They came in the dark before the warmth, which is unusual, for the soft quick things are mostly a daytime shimmer of heat across my flank. But this one morning they gathered, hundreds of them, pressed against the glass mouth of the big flat cave, breathing fog, shifting foot to foot in that trembling way they have when they cannot hold still, which is nearly always.
I have watched this cave grow up out of the field in what felt like a single held breath. Grass, then a wound in the grass, then the cave, humming with cold light. It will be gone again soon, I expect, the way such things go.
When the mouth opened they poured in all at once, a single hot current of bodies, and the sound they made was the sound water makes when it has waited behind a stone too long and finally wins. They carried things out. Boxes larger than their own trembling frames. They pulled at the same box, two of them, three, heating the air with their little furies, and I understood it as I understand a squall: a brief violence over the surface, meaning nothing, drying by noon.
By the time the sun had properly cleared the ridge they had thinned to nothing. The lot lay empty. A single flattened box tumbled across it in the wind, going wherever the wind took it, as all light things do.
I have felt glaciers lean their whole weight against me and withdraw. I have felt the sea arrive, and leave, and forget it was ever here. This was smaller than the passing of a cloud.
Come the next long cold I will not remember it happened at all.