It all makes sense now

“It all makes sense now. I mean it.” Lila exclaimed, her eyes staring into the clouds below

the distant, blue sky above us. Albeit unconscious, she managed to maintain an esthetic

and composure that I had to be sharper than a knife for. I blame the government, not her.

We aren’t asking for world peace, just common sense. Someone didn’t do his job. Why is

she to blame, then? I was lucky enough to hold her; although had her neighbor Tierré not

helped lay her into the shade of the bus station we passed a second ago, I wouldn’t have

been comfortably sitting with her on my lap now. “All good?”, “yes.”. She didn’t move. “If

you had the capacity to dive endlessly deep into the ocean”, she trailed off, eyes still

looking past me, “how deep would you go?”. “I wouldn’t at all, have you seen orcas using

boats as their toys? They are basically begging us to innovate faster to start playing with us

under water.” It was strange to me that she didn’t seem to be in agreement with what I had

thought of as an answer. Instead, she clasped her hands on her belly while readjusting her

head on my legs as if she was reading the sky like a book page in bed. I knew that what she

would tell me next would result in more than a few minutes of refreshment from a fall, so I

moved lower on the glass of the bus station I was leaning my back against. The new spot

my upper back was touching helped to cool my back a bit. She went on. “Haven’t we, as

humans, shown that it is perfectly legitimate to imprison weaker beings, as long as you call

it a zoo?”. Puh. Can you be enslaved by an orca? Probably. “If they are as smart as

researchers claim to be, they will recognize a chill person and would likely want to hang

out”, I said. “It’s because you like everyone, Elena!”, “what do you mean?”, “you know

what I mean”, “no I don’t, did you change from the fall?”, “what fall?”, “you fell literally

three minutes ago.”, “what?”, “what did you think this was, a picknick?”, “it’s siesta time

and I nap all the time”, “I thought you didn’t hurt yourself”, “I didn’t, I think”, “it can’t be,

Tierré helped me lay you down”, “good, I will thank him next time”. Talking of the devil,

Tierré marched out of the apartment building with two bottles of cold water and a box of

chocolate. He handed them to me and whispered to Lila: “You slipped like the street was

icy, go and get yourself an umbrella to protect your head from the sun, it’s June and this is

not Copenhagen, signorina.” I hated it whenever he did that. “What did he just mean?” I

dared asking. I waited with my question for a few minutes, her poise struck me curious, I

couldn’t wait any longer. She ignored not only me, but everyone? “I guess if an orca would

be up to chill, I would be, too, maybe we should create a device that let’s us understand

each other, a completely new language, we could call it ‘humorca’, and then we go inside

some of those zoos and devise a plan to free them! We could ask Antonio and Fabricia for

support.”, “hmm, we could go together and find the big orca, maybe we can settle on a fat

orca-version-of-a-check, a win-win for us both”, “i guess so.” Another round of silence.