This morning a small crowd of the warm quick things gathered on the grass above me, all facing one direction, all leaking water from their faces, which they do sometimes when the weather in them turns. They had dug a narrow wound in the soil, deeper than they usually bother, and into it they lowered one of their own, gone still.
I have felt this before. Every so often they bring me a still one and give it back to the ground, packing the earth down, laying a cut flower on top that will be brown by the time the shadow crosses the hill.
They stood a long while. For them, I gather, this was a long while: perhaps an hour, perhaps two, a good stretch of a single afternoon. They spoke in low sounds and pressed their soft bodies against one another as if to share heat, and the water kept coming, and then, slowly, it stopped, and they drifted off toward their moving metal boxes and were gone.
The still one is down there now, close against my flank, quiet as I am. It will keep me company through the wet season and the dry, and by the time the roots find it and the water works it soft and it becomes, at last, the same patient stuff as everything else, I will not be able to tell where it ends and the hill begins.
They think they buried something. What a small, warm idea.
They simply set a fast thing down among the slow ones, and left before it learned to hold still.