The boy had always assumed the other children of the island were just like him, that they heard as he heard, that they roamed as he roamed. After all, just as he noticed the subtle changes in their timbre and tone, so they seemed to understand him without words, and the small exchanges between them felt easy and natural, unlike those he met after leaving the island.

"What is it like, to see?" he once asked the girl.

The girl was silent for a moment, for she remembered her caretakers, and how sure they had been of what the future held, and how much value they had put into metals of a certain color.

"Seeing will not prevent you from being blind," she said.

The mute child saw the world strung with a million threads, that unfurled from fingers and toes and head and heart, in a massive, ever shifting web that suffused all open space and moved as people moved, constantly morphing before his eyes. Around some the strands were fine as gossamer, while others were as hard as chicken wire. Some people spoke often to each other and spent time together without their threads ever colliding, while others had but to brush shoulder to shoulder when their strands tangled and knotted with one another, leaving behind an intertwined mess of linen and silver.

Such entanglements were all over the place, and if the mute child wanted, he could put a finger on the string and follow it eventually to its source, though his touch could never change the direction of the strings themselves. He saw once an area full of beautiful silk embroidery supported beneath with plain hemp and almost embarked on a quest to find its origin, only to stop because at some point the silk turned to razor sharp glass and cut his fingers. So he stopped, and allowed the threads to swirl by him as they naturally would as he passed.

His own mouth was bound by a complex knot of cotton that originated from his eyes, and when he tried to speak vibrations flowed down the cotton into the network, and the textures subtly shifted from plain cotton to velvet to twine, but no one ever seemed to notice.

The only difference were certain children, children he had grown up with. Some children had threads going straight into their ears, and when he spoke, the vibrations seemed to go into their ears as well, and they understood him perfectly. There were others whose strands pierced their eyes, like him, and one child with two fine threads that crept inside the nostrils.

It had frustrated the mute child greatly in his younger years, not being able to communicate, though as he saw more and more of the world he began to realize that there were those whose threads formed protective barriers around their ears, or metal that blocked entry into the heart, and he grew to understand that even those with voices aren't able to communicate well at times.

Still, he envied those who had a voice. And he was wonderfully grateful to those that taught him and understood how to speak in gestures, because to him, it was like reclaiming half a world of loneliness.

The boy had always assumed the other children of the island were just like him, and this, perhaps, was his greatest undoing.