There is a small quick creature standing very close to the flat cold pool of light that hangs on the wall, and it will not leave.
I have watched water do this. Water comes to a still surface and looks at itself and stays, sometimes for a whole spring, until the sun takes it away. But water is patient. This one is not. It holds up a small bright shard, and it turns its warm soft body one way, then another, tightening and lifting the pinkish limbs, pressing them, arranging the meat of itself into some shape it prefers, over and over, in the time it takes a cloud to cross me.
Then it goes. Others come and do the same. They are always doing the same. The room smells of salt and effort and the faint sourness the quick ones give off when they push against heavy things for no reason I can find, since the heavy things stay exactly where they were.
I think it is trying to remember what it looks like. I understand this. I too am slowly wearing away, grain by grain, and one day I will not be the shape I am now. But that will take longer than this creature's whole line of descendants, and I am not worried, because I am a hundred million afternoons deep and worry is a thing that requires a hurry I have never once felt.
It looked so hard at the little light. It wanted the light to keep the shape.
The light kept nothing. It never does. By the time the ice comes down again and grinds this whole warm bright room back into gravel and lays me bare to the wind, I will have forgotten there was ever anything soft here at all.