Little Lizzy (to be edited...)

To her, it was clear from the beginning that the most important detail had been overlooked. Not that it would change anything, of course. What she thought mattered very little, if at all, regardless of the fact that she was absolutely right and they were desperately wrong.
Therefore, she was forced to hold it all back. They wouldn't have understood, they wouldn't have accepted the outburst of plain, brilliant reasoning. They were not ready to embrace it. They were not intellectually equipped to cope with it.
There seemed to be no room in the current context (as there was probably no room in this world in general) for those who had a sharp and instinctive insight on the most complex situations.
And there was certainly no desire, in the indigenous population currently gathered in the living-room, for little Lizzy to start expressing her opinion about the ragged way the case was currently being solved in the television set. A babbling child was bad enough to everyone's opinion. A babbling child emitting its squeaky noises when there was a program on was bordering crime against humanity.
Little Lizzy knew that only too well and even though she was confident that what she had to say would solve the case and allow everyone to switch to a far more interesting activity than letting their brains slowly fry in the vicinity of a flat screen, she curled up in her over-long jacket and did what she knew to be expected to do: she kept her mouth shut, and after a second of hard and wise thinking, she came to the doubly wise conclusion that not only it was better that way, but that she also would benefit starting to enjoy keeping things to herself.
Things, all sorts of things, most things actually, were treated decently when they remained within the borders of her head, whereas they were almost systematically chased, debilitated and crushed when she had the misfortune to let them accidentally slip out.
"It doesn't make sense, girl, you don't know what you're blabbing about!", "leave grown up things to grown ups and go play in your room" or "oh, just shut it will you!?" were sentences that she was well used to hear, and the very same ones that she had come to define, in the clairvoyant heart of youth, as "not kind".
"Not kind" is, of course, an understatement. Or rather a kind statement depicting an utterly unkind attitude. Lizzy's family could not be counted amongst the kind people. What saved them was that they were not mean either. Basically, they were just useless.



I became aware of the existence of Little Lizzy the day of the explosion, or rather should I say, at the exact moment an explosive charge expertly hidden under the decomposing seat of a derelict barber shop I was passing by chose – or was programmed to, set off.

It is queer, how time twists at crucial moments. It took me a while to recompose the chronological events of the day preceding the accident – and for that matter, the days before that, and the years before. I am aware that past time is supposed to enter a progressive phase of blur once we look at it from the little cross indicating the present on a timeline, but this was different. It was as if my perception of present and future had suddenly expanded into a vast canvas of interwoven threads I was looking at from so close – or with such an acute eye, that I could perceive the outlines of every single filament, every single atom making its structure. Or maybe it was the past that had shrunk to almost nothing, to a thumbnail of itself. Had it not been for the persistent feeling of it, I could almost think that I had been reborn just then, in the chaotic dispersion of polygonal glass, multi-sized shards of feasted-on-by-termites wood, and abrasive dust. All I could remember in the immediate aftermath was my newly enlightened inner perception of the laws of gravity. The blow had torn my 128 lbs. from the asphalt in one single swift vector. I was nearing the end of one of my long customary fasts and in spite of being considerably lighter than usual (I had lost 35 lbs. in little more than three weeks), my decaying and weakened muscles and aching joints were having a lot of trouble carrying my body step after step.

... (30/09/15)