A great warmth arrived in the hollow room, dozens of the soft quick creatures crowding together, giving off the particular heat of excitement, which I have felt before and which always passes. In the center of them sat one whose weight had recently changed, grown heavier by a small amount over what for them is a very long time and for me is nothing, less than the settling of a single grain of sand against my flank.
They had gathered, as they do, around the arrival of a new small one. It was not yet present. It was still being made. This struck the warm creatures as a matter of the greatest urgency, though the making of anything worth mentioning takes a good deal longer than they seem to grasp. I have watched a mountain be assembled. It did not require balloons.
They pressed soft folded things into the heavy one's arms, and there was a high fast sound they make when pleased, and much moving of small warm hands. All of it flickered by at the speed I have come to expect from them, a shadow crossing the ground before noon, gone before I could consider whether it meant anything.
I understood this much: another warm quick thing was coming to join the others, to be briefly here, to give off heat and hurry about and then, like every one before it, to stop. They celebrated this. They seemed to find the shortness no obstacle at all.
The room cooled. The warmth left through the door and did not return. By the time the frost next works its slow fingers into my seams, the small one they were so glad about will have had its whole warm afternoon and gone, and I will not have noticed it leave.