Owen pushed the straw hat back on his head and wiped the hot sweat from his brow, 
surveying the plot of land. The sun beat down hard and baked the soil; he worried 
that the heat would destroy the lentils he'd just planted, but if it did... ah 
well, they'd just have to stretch things a bit further, and he'd look a little 
harder for opportunities to work and barter for food. 

A welcome breeze rustled through the trees, and carried along with it a husky 
alto voice singing lullabies. He smiled, and decided that the planting had gone 
well, and he was done for the day. As he headed for the back porch, he left the 
hoe leaning against the stair rail, and hummed along to the lullaby. 

Donnie, wearing a loose print dress, stirred a pot on the stove with a wooden 
spoon, singing softly about angels who watched over sweet little babies. Owen 
grinned, slipped an arm around her waist and ran the other hand gently over her 
swollen belly. Her tufted ears flicked as she beamed at him. "Ooh, there, did you 
feel that? Baby just kicked!" 

"I sure did," he said. "The kid's going to be a mule, with a kick like that!" She 
wrinkled her nose at him and leaned forward for a kiss, a request he was utterly 
prepared to fulfill. He grinned, thinking of the cozy bed where they'd conceived 
this, their second child, on a snowed-in night. 

"Your father will be thrilled to be getting a second grandchild," Donnie said, as 
if she read his mind. "Is he really going to be meeting us at the coffeehouse 
tonight?" 

Owen moved over to the rugged wood workbench and picked up his guitar. "He might 
even arrive early enough to see me play. He's mellowed a lot, after his health 
scare, and especially after getting grandkids." He slipped off both boots, and 
lying down on the workbench with his guitar across his chest, he put his bare 
feet on either side of the cradle, and started rocking the cradle in time with 
the new song he was working on about living inside a mountain. 

In the middle of the third verse, about musical caves of ice, fire, earth and 
air, he worked out a better chord progression to replace the one that had always 
bothered him. He felt a stir of pleasure, and decided he'd try the new song out 
tonight before the audience. As he was trying to decide whether to end the song 
or to bridge into another, he felt a stirring from the cradle. "Time for Lil' Un 
to get up, do you think?" Donnie nodded. "Right, then." 

Owen leaned the guitar against the wall, got to his feet, and reached into the 
cradle, cooing softly to his first child. He cradled the blanket-swaddled form in 
his arms, and pulled the homespun cloth away from her face. Out of her pointed 
purple-gray face, her eyes blinked open; one gray, sightless orb and one 
green-irised eye looked up at him. Her vestigial mouth came as close to a smile 
as it could. ** Daddy!! ** 

Owen sat bolt upright, breath catching in his throat. No Earth farmhouse on a 
summer's day; no cradles and coffeehouses; only a rough, out-of-the-way little 
cave, warm and thickly coated with moss but dark, only a faint trace of 
luminescence coming from the low ceiling. Beside him, Donnie sighed in her - his 
- Donnie's sleep, and curled towards him a little more. 

Owen lay down again slowly, and felt Donnie's arm cross his chest and rest there 
comfortably. Donnie snuggled up a little closer and murmured something muffled by 
his chest. Running his hand over Donnie's bare and flat belly, Owen felt a 
melancholy sense of loss.