think about it, there must be higher love
down in the heart or hidden in the stars above
Isle felt it too, the balance of their strange little family. She felt the way father seemed so calm, so comfortable, like an anchor that kept mother from drifting too far. And she felt the way mother was like a bird, grounded for now, but always on the verge of falling away into the deep blue sky. But they balanced each other, or father balanced mother, and the dynamic worked. It wouldn’t matter in the years to come, when Isle would truly understand, because it worked, and that meant it did not have to make sense.
When Wyck turns to Oksana, Isle turns to Dempsey. He pushes his nose against her forelock and she lifts her face to push her own impossibly small nose against his with a small huff of breath. “Dad?” She asks in a voice as small as her newborn body, “why is it getting so loud? My head hurts.” Her brow furrows and her eyes close as she flattens her ears against her head. She had heard them before, when she was still sleeping beside Wyck in the warm place, but everything had been dulled then. She could hear her brother and her mother, and sometime another voice, but everything else had been like the wind in the leaves. Now, as morning passed them by and the population of the Meadow began to swell, Isle had a cacophony of urgent whispers and hissing ringing in her thoughts.
But then Wyck turns back to her and the excitement in his thoughts is so strong, so tangible, that the other noise fades a little. She leans close and huffs a small breath against his cheek, her own dark eyes wide with delight. “Yes! What do you think an Isle is supposed to be like?” She asks her brother and her tiny brow furrows again. And then another thought falls into her hand and she catches it like a snowflake. “Do I get to be different too?”
ISLE