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“Why can’t you fly, Daddy?” Lilly had asked her father once.
“Because I don’t have wings, sweetheart,” he’d responded.
“But Mommy has wings. Why don’t you have wings?”
“Because not everybody is born with wings.”
Lilly felt sad for her dad and she felt sad for all the other people who didn’t have wings too. Flying was so much fun. Flying was an important part of her. She couldn’t imagine not being able to fly.
She loved the sky. She loved being in it, loved feeling the wind, loved everything about it.
“I thought you wanted to hike with me, Lilly?” her father called her from the mountain.
Lilly flew down closer to him, but didn’t land. “I am!” she told him.
Her father smiled exasperatedly and shook his head. “You can’t hike if you’re flying,” he said.
Lilly pouted at him. “But walking gets boring,” she proclaimed.
Her dad laughed. “If you say so, pumpkin.”
“Besides, can’t you hear that the sky wants me to fly?”
Her dad stopped, so Lilly did too, flapping her gold wings to keep her in the air. Her dad blinked up at her. “Hear the sky?” he asked.
Lilly nodded. “Uh huh. You can hear the sky, can’t you?”
Cole smiled up at her, then knelt down and put a hand on the rocky ground. “No. But I can hear the earth,” he said.
Lilly blinked this time. “Oh.”
“Well,” Cole said, “faintly. It doesn’t speak to me as much as it used to.” He got up and kept hiking.
Lilly flew along beside him. She wondered what the earth sounded like.
Then suddenly, there was a giant boom and then a man’s voice cried, “Help!”
Cole and Lilly rushed in the direction it had come from, finding the man stuck under a fallen tree. “Help me!”
“Don’t worry, I’ll get you out!” Cole said, then ran up to the tree. He took a deep breath, then tried to lift it off of the lumberjack, grunting and huffing.
But it wasn’t moving. Cole wasn’t giving up, but he just didn’t have the same strength as he used to.
Lilly knew she had to do something.
She lowered herself to the ground and took her shoes and socks off. She wriggled her bare feet on the mountain. It was scratchy, but not exactly unpleasant. She breathed in the scent of the earth, the grass, the dirt and just felt it, really felt it, for once. It wasn’t so bad. It smelled alive.
And she heard its deep voice and felt it rumble in her bones.
Her arms and her wings lit up, and so did the tree, startling Cole backwards. Then Lilly flapped her wings and flew up, thrusting her glowing fists into the air, and the tree rose off of the man.
Cole helped him scramble out from under the tree’s shadow, then Lilly floated back down to the mountain and so did the tree. Her arms and her wings stopped glowing.
“Thank you,” the man said.
“No problem!” Lilly gave him a thumbs up.
“Lilly,” Cole said, kneeling down to her and putting his hands on her shoulders, “How did you do that?”
Lilly grinned at him. “I heard the earth, Daddy!”