7 Billion Amazing Stories in This World

image from google

At dVerse Poets Pub, Brian told us about a book he loves titled 6 Billion Others, a book of peoples' faces, with a few lines about their amazing stories. Now there is an updated version titled 7 Billion Others. Brian says "I love people". I love people too, and this is a topic that has always fascinated me: how every single person has the most amazing story. If we tried to write peoples'  stories as fiction, editors would scoff and say they weren't believable. Because real life is often - even usually -  more astounding than anything a fiction writer could think up. I know my life certainly has been!

He asked us to tell the story of someone we have seen or observed....I thought of this elderly couple, now dead, whose house I used to clean in their final months. When she told me this story, it knocked me OUT!



She sat in her chair by the window all day.
Her husband lay in his bed.
The house smelled of decay, 
dryness, dust, and mothballs.
It smelled of the years
they had lived in that house,
where life had once been so lively,
but where silence now 
oppressively ruled
the empty hours.

The drapes stayed closed
all day.
She listened to the ticking
of the clock,
that moved her through the hours
left to her: breakfast,
lunch, dinner, bedtime.
Day after day,
no one ever came.

But one day, out of the blue,
when she was remembering,
she told her cleaning woman
a little bit about wartime in Italy.

"We had nothing to eat.
The boys were teenagers, 
thin and famished.
I would work all day,
hard work,
in exchange for
two slices of bread.
And, if we had two slices of bread,
we cut small squares for each of us, 
and left most of it for the boys.
They were always hungry.

My sister's husband
had been captured by the enemy.
He had disappeared 
and she didn't know
if he was alive or dead.
While he was gone,
she had a daughter
he did not know about,
for he was disappeared
before she knew
a child was coming.

One day the phone rang
and it was finally him,
        -alive!-
calling from the prison camp,
where he had just been liberated.
She heard his voice on the phone
and her first words, 
in a flood of tears, were:
'Vincenzio, you have a daughter!
She is five years old! We have a daughter!'
She had waited five long years 
to be able to tell him
that he had a child.

When the war ended,
we all moved to Canada.
We had had enough of pain, 
of terror, of bombs, of hunger.

Here, we found peace.
We made a life.
We raised our children.

But I will never forget
that phone call, 
after five long years,
and my sister saying,
'Vincenzio,
we have a daughter!'"