Two of the soft quick warm things have arranged themselves across a flat slab, facing, and are producing the little rapid heat-flutter I have come to associate with fear that has not decided whether to run. I have felt this vibration before, in prey, in things about to bolt. Here neither bolts.
They stay. They lean and retreat and lean again, an oscillation so fast I can barely track it, like the flicker of a shadow when clouds cross a sun.
One has its heat gathered high in the face; the surface there has flushed, warmed, the way my own skin warms when the light finds it. The other holds a vessel of cool liquid and turns it and turns it and does not drink. I know this cool. It is the temperature of the deep places where the water sits and waits for the mountains to come down to it, which they will, in time, in no hurry.
They make sounds at each other in bursts and then go still, and in the stillness the heat between them rises, and I think: perhaps they will fuse, as two grains fuse under pressure into one denser thing that endures. But pressure takes ages, and they have only an afternoon, and already one is rising, and the other, and the warmth lifts off my slab and moves away in two directions, or perhaps one.
I do not know which, and it does not signify. By the time the ice returns to grind this valley flat, whatever was decided here will have dried, like the wetness after rain, and I will not recall that anything at all sat warm upon me, briefly, and shook.