The Solitary Girl

The girl in the corner is small, inconspicuous. She sits with her legs pulled tight to her body, embracing herself with skinny arms, hands clasped in front of bruised shins, her cheek resting on top of her knees. She looks forlorn and isolated. Her long, unkempt hair is the color of red brick, concealing her dark little face like a curtain. Sometimes, when people walk by, she looks up and a sudden anxious expression crosses her otherwise unmoved face, her eyes timid like those of a cornered animal. Her lips open slightly, as if to say something, but she never breathes a single word, silently watching the passersby, before sinking back into her own world, away from the noise and the hustle surrounding her. She's dirty and her threadbare clothes are way too big for her thin body. When she shuffles her feet on the blanket you can see her tiny bare toes, grey with dust. She sits motionless, dispassionately staring into space with tired eyes which seem to have seen it all. She is nine, maybe ten years old.

Raising her head now, she puts a finger to her mouth, biting a nail. Her eyes follow a clumsy little dog sniffing at a garbage can in the alley next to her. For a moment her face becomes almost lively, child-like joy brightens her eyes. „Doggie..." she whispers. When the dog owner spots her, he pulls the puppy away, shooting her a disdainful look. Her smile fades away, devoid of passion she drops her arms and persists in the corner until night falls.

When it's dark, she walks over to the dustbin by the street light, searching the discarded carry out bags from the nearby fast food restaurant for leftovers. She takes what she finds back into the corner with her and leaning against the wall, snarfs down half a cold, rubbery cheeseburger and some french fries. Then she lets her tiny body slip down the wall and cloaking herself with the ragged blanket, falls asleep in the dirt. In her sleep she is happy sometimes, her dreams conjuring up vague pictures of the child she used to be, experiencing a joy that has long ceased to extend into the daylight.

She hardly recollects the time when she had a home, a family, a name. The only reality she knows these days is the hunger — and the fear. The fear of humans, of being beaten up, being laughed at and ridiculed. She can not remember what there was before the fear, before alternately being chased after and being chased away, fleeing and hiding like a hunted deer.

Tomorrow, when she wakes, she will move on. Some days she is lucky and people give her a little money, sometimes even enough coins to buy some chocolate. She loves chocolate. She'll scour about until noon, begging in front of the mall, always on the lookout for the police, avoiding to be caught and brought back to that terrible place she fears more than the cold, more than the dirt and loneliness, more than the hunger even. If she can't get enough money for food, she'll hang around the street market at closing time, hoping for the merchants to let her have some of the rotten fruits they can not sell.

In the late afternoon she'll be looking for another dark corner, another place to protect her from the wind, hiding from the world for one more night. Sheltered from the looks of disdainful strangers she'll fall asleep — hungry or not — dreaming the dream of the child she has once been, until waking to another morning, leaving the hope behind with the dream.


(this has been written a long time ago, living in Ireland, inspired by a homeless little girl in the streets of Dublin. After so many years, I dreamt of her the other night and remembered this story from almost twenty years ago, that I wrote after coming across her again and again, sighting her in different places, always on her own, quite unlike the other street kids. I've never been homeless ... and yet I could see myself in her for different reasons ... I have often wondered what may have become of her ... that silent, solitary little street girl with the red hair and sad eyes that I've never been quite able to forget.)