Island In The Sky Dana Kroos
“Start with: ‘In the beginning...’ “In the beginning the earth had just one enormous continent.” Dad chewed his words uncertainly—unfamiliar food that he did not want to swallow but was too polite to spit out, his stomach turning nervously at the thought of digestion. His fingers entwined to make a basket of his hands too tight to let light through the cracks. At four-and-a-half years old, Mariah’s sister Fiona tried to repeat the gesture, overlapping rather than interlocking so that one hand held the other. “One island,” Mariah said. She was seven and always looking for ways to be helpful. “And one sea,” Dad confirmed. The three of them were crowded into Fiona’s lower bunk, she and Fiona under the flower-patterned duvet, and their dad above it and between them, so that his weight pinned her and her sister in place at his sides. They stared together into the dark wall of the upper bunk. Their voic144