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Isla’s Point of View
I woke up thinking about udders.
Not a sentence I’d ever expected to form, even silently, but there it was — lodged in my brain before the rooster had finished his first performance. I’d spent forty minutes the previous night reading about goat husbandry on my phone, the cell signal holding just long enough to deliver a series of increasingly alarming veterinary websites before cutting out mid-paragraph, as though the island had decided I’d learned enough.
What I’d learned was this: dairy goats need milking twice a day, approximately twelve hours apart. Miss a milking, and the pressure builds. Miss two and you’re looking at mastitis, pain, reduced yield, and potential infection. The websites used words like “engorgement” and “tissue damage” with the casual authority of sources that assumed their readers already owned goats and simply needed reminding.