A small warm creature was set upon me this morning, hollow and hard-shelled, holding a pool of heat that steamed and then, over the span of an afternoon, did not. This is the whole of its ambition. To be filled, to go cold, to be filled again. I have watched water do far grander things.
Water carved the valley behind me across an age so long the quick ones have no word for it, and here it sits in a little baked cup, waiting.
The soft thing that carries this cup grips it as though it were the last heat in the world. Its hands close around the curve, and I feel, through the table I lean against, the tremor of its haste: it holds the warmth for a breath, sets it down, snatches it up, sets it down.
Forty times in one morning. The warmth leaks out no matter how it clutches. It always does. Heat goes where the cold is; even I know that, and I know almost nothing quickly.
I have felt this cup crack once, in a fall, and the soft thing made a sound and swept the pieces away and mourned, briefly, in the manner of a passing shadow. Then it found another cup. There are always more cups. There have been, I would guess, a great many of them pass across this one table.
The frost is coming again, slow and blue, the kind that grinds mountains to sand. It will take the cup, and the table, and the soft warm thing that clutches at its little pool of heat. I will still be here, cooling at exactly the rate I always cool. I will not remember the cup.
I have already nearly forgotten this morning.