issue i: elizabeth olson's Lizzy Crystallized

“Sometimes the rare, the beautiful, can only emerge or survive in isolation...They had not reached that point of utter cynicism, that distrust of self and of the human past which leads finally to total entrapment in that past, “man crystallized.?? "
Loren Eisely, The Night Country

She was opt to think of herself as Elizabeth Bennet; “Lizzy” to her pet rabbits. She was paler than most. She executed technique with passion, not talent. She liked red, circular lollipops; they reminded her of the sun at 8:34PM, when a trillion people look at it, and presume its crimson. When it melts away into your lips.
Lizzy wrote poetry, an aggressive form of her passivity. She couldn’t publish her papers to save her life due to an inclination to engage an internal rhyme scheme. Her writing was too feminine for academia, she inferred from all the rejection letters. She skipped academic conferences. She went on digs alone. An anthropologist is not unique in his inclination to isolate, but none were as successful as was Lizzy.
She walked alone at night, from her Thoreauvian cottage on Lake Meniscus into the open fields of the meadows surrounding. She strode without fear, not a characteristic of the female sex, yet something Elizabeth Bennet would do. The wind toyed her head, making her earlobes drip heavy with oranges and her throat burdened, gulping a huge apple. Lizzy resentfully worshiped the wind, trying not to dive too hard into its freedom, into its swiftly melancholic efficacy.
She followed the breeze as unaffected as she could, each blade under her feet a reminder not to twirl and whirl into Piazzolla’s oblivion, no matter how overwhelming was the openness of everything she could not have. She came to a grassy spot she often borrowed, and knew exactly where and how to sit to not disturb the resting bones. A rabbits’ graveyard did not require Lizzy to alter her normal behavior as she simply observed the precision with which each old bone asserted its own ossuary in which was ossified the twitching wonderment of a rabbit transfixed to stillness in the moonlight.
With the penetration of no other anthropologist, Lizzy was able to tell the rabbits’ stories from mapping the progression of osteoblastogenesis, which was a science perceived not by the mind, but by a proper construction of senses and reactions felt deep within one’s own bone marrow. Lizzy had written a paper on it once. It was too light for the journals.
Lizzy sat until morning, feeling the intensity of lapine evolution, its stark cessation in contrast to her own jutting and narrow hipbones. After those many hours of sitting, Lizzy went to relieve herself in a bush. As she did this, she suddenly heard the familiar, yet distant grasp of human vocal chords that were not her own. Without moving an inch, she twisted her head around slowly.
“Listen, fella,” said a short, seemingly good-humored man, “I’m sure you far from home, but that don’t mean I like to find a man taking a piss in my bushes when I’m lookin’ to shoot my breakfast. Y’hear?”
Lizzy’s eyes fell, her limbs twitching in unnatural paralysis. The moonlight of the night was replaced by the unbecoming glow of morning. There she was, emerging from the cynicism of her bones’ oscillation: she was “man crystallized.”
Lizzy turned, she apologized, she left. Leaves, like urns of rabbit and human marrow, crunched under her feet as she returned to the cacophony of her isolation; her essence like the swift melancholy of the wind, but more twitchy, and without the freedom.