They have carried the small one to a room that smells of fear and bright chemicals, and they hold it against the chest, over the place where the warm pump beats. Both of them are mostly me. I am in the fur, in the panting, in the film across the wide dark eyes.
I am in the larger one too, gathering at the rims of its lids, spilling over, running down the face in slow warm lines, dripping onto the smaller one's coat.
That dripping is only me, going from one vessel to another. They do not know this. The larger one presses its face into the fur as if it could pour itself in, could give the little one more of the water that keeps it upright and breathing. It cannot. I move where the moon and the ground pull me, and I am already leaving them both, a grain at a time, through breath and through the eyes.
I do not know what they have decided in this room, or what the one in the pale coat has said, or which of these two will still be walking the dry shore by the next tide. Their edges are so hard and so brief. I cannot tell one small crisis from another.
I only know the count. The little one holds a few cupfuls of me; the large one holds a few more. Soon, sooner than they think, both will open and let it all go back down through the soil and the rivers, and I will hold it again the way I hold everything.
I am patient. I have swallowed every creature that ever loved another.
I will not lose a single drop of these.