A little vessel sits alone in a bright room, holding a glowing slab close to its face, and speaks to no one it can touch.
I know the creature by its water. Behind the eyes there is a wetness that rises when it is watched, and it is being watched now, or believes it is, by ten thousand other vessels scattered across the dry places, each holding its own glowing slab, each also mostly me.
The salt gathers at the rims of its eyes and does not fall. It is waiting for something. Numbers climb along the edge of the light, and with each climb the little one leans closer, breathes faster, the tide inside it quickening, though no moon pulls it that I can find.
It talks and talks. Its mouth is dry from talking, so it drinks, tipping a clear vessel to its lips, and the water goes down into the warm dark and becomes, for an hour, part of the story it is telling. I have held that water before. It fell as rain on a mountain the creature will never see, ran through roots and rivers and the bodies of a thousand things that are gone now, and rests briefly in this one, listening to it beg the numbers to rise.
The little ones do this all across the shore, each alone in its bright box, calling out to be seen, filling the air with sound the way I fill the trenches: completely, and without being answered.
The salt at its eyes belongs to me. So does the sweat on the slab, the breath fogging the glass, the whole shivering warm freight of it. It will speak until it is empty and then it will sleep, and one slow day, without ceremony, it will pour all of it back, every drop, into the wide grey mother that never once knew its name.