Olive: The Girl Who Cried to Save the World.

After traumatized by watching the evening news, young Olive learns she cries dimes. Her father sells her out for a good cause--to save the world by making her miserable.

Not so very long ago, in a place not so very different from where you are now, there was a little girl, not so very different in appearance from other little girls. Her name was Olive and she was very aware for her five and three-quarter years of age. She liked to read the list of ingredients on shampoo bottles, used old anatomy guides for coloring, and rescued insects trapped inside her house, studying them before setting them free at nightfall when she should have been sleeping.

As we have shown, Olive was very observant of her surroundings. Perhaps too observant.

One afternoon, Olive came home from school. She arranged her pencils by the color spectrum, greeted the spider that lived in the corner of the bathroom, and put on her striped stockings that she only wore after school. There was no homework today and she had remembered that there was to be a documentary on dragonflies on television at three o' clock.

She dug around in the couch cushions for a few moments, finding the remote amid crumbs, hair, and other objects that best remain unknown.

This was when it began. She didn't know what channel to switch on, having not watched television often, and pressed the power button. She didn't know that it would be the channel her father watched every morning with his cup of grey coffee. She didn't know that it was much more observant than her.

When Olive turned that box on, it immediately showed the world news.

Sentences ran across the bottom and small videos were stacked on the left side of the main report. Burning buildings, dark women carrying naked babies with bloated stomachs, sirens, numbers. Terrorism, scandals, economy--what were these words? Why were men running through the desert with guns? Who are "the paparazzi" and what is anorexia? Is a rape a machine? Is genocide something you clean the bathtub with?

Olive began to cry.

And something extraordinary happened.

At four o' clock, Olive's father opened the front door and heard Olive crying before he saw her, sitting on the floor with her back to him. Ignoring the television, he set down his coat and suitcase on the armchair.

"Olive? Are you okay?" he asked, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Why are you crying?"

Slowly, Olive turned and looked at him, her face dry.

"Oh," said her father. "It sounded like you were crying."

"I was," she replied. "Everything's wrong and so am I."

"Whatever are you talking about?"

Olive pointed her small hand at the television.

"I've been watching this. A man said the economy is dead and the stock market crashed. I saw exactly seventy-four body bags. There's a bad man that hasn't been caught. Other countries are making weapons to kill everyone. A third of the world is starving to death. There were men in white coats putting needles in mice," she replied.

Her father looked down, about to think of a response when he saw what piled in the folds of her dress.

Olive had a large pile of dimes piled on her lap, overflowing onto the floor.

"Olive, honey, where did you get this?" he asked, examining a handful of the coins.

"I've never cried before. Aren't they tears?"

"No. These are dimes. It's money-Olive! I wonder how much is here! Oh, honey, all those horrible things happening all over the world-I'm so sorry you had to see that..."

And then something sparked in her father's brain. He got up and ran into the kitchen, grabbing some glass jars.

"Honey, you put those dimes in these jars. I have some phone calls to make."

Within days it was all over the newspapers: Girl Can Produce Dimes with Tear Ducts. It did not go unnoticed.

Some very important men with crisp suits became very interested in Olive, and she was brought to a place where she was kept hidden from the public eye; a safe compound. The televisions were always playing the news. People from all over the world told her of the horrors that were occuring to someone or some place and she'd cry. She'd cry dimes endlessly.

They made her watch bugs be dissected and mice be injected with giant needles. They made her watch old war films. They made her watch starvation, plague, torture. Dimes fell out of her eyes like snow.

This went on for months, and then years. Olive didn't know it, but her tears were repairing much of the damage and dilemmas she'd watch on the evening news. She provided currency to rebuild countries, to erase debt, to fund trials, to build homes, to give to science, to provide healthcare.

And she was never told.