There was a small, stick-thin girl at my school who always appeared blurry. She was called Sophie or Susie or something, but we all called her “Hummingbird”.

Hummingbird showed up complete, so to speak, in photographs; however, in the flesh, you couldn’t quite focus on her perfectly, as she moved too fast for the eye to clearly see.

Though, of course, to Hummingbird, everyone ELSE must have appeared blurry!

She did everything lightning fast, as if living with the buzz of a constant sugar rush. For lunch, she ate the food of three or four people, consumed frenetically whilst standing up. It was something to do with her heart beating faster than yours or mine, hence why she required much more sustenance, and a highly specialized sustenance at that.

I’d ask her how she could cope with constantly moving so quickly, but she’d laugh and asked how I could cope with moving so slow. At least, I think that’s what she said, in her high-pitched machine-gun buzz, like a big insect.

Out on the court, Hummingbird bounced the basketball so fast that it smoldered and smoked, and one time, it burst with a great big BANG, like gunfire.

Hummingbird collapsed in the classroom, as her heart gave out, just before her eighth birthday; I guess her heart had to work far harder than normal. It was the only time I’d seen her lie still. Periodically she’d screech and frenetically thrash her limbs around, but she was in her death throes. She couldn’t rise up off her back.

Alongside the other scientists, if you could call us that, I stood and scribbled my notes, keeping just out of reach of her seventy-centimeter razor-sharp proboscis, rather like a beak, which Hummingbird had employed to pierce people’s breastplates and then drink deep from the human heart.