The soft quick thing has made a smaller, softer, quicker thing, and now every warm body in the room bends toward it in turn, cradling the new one against the chest, jostling and murmuring, as though passing along a coal that must not go out.
I have watched water do more with less fuss. I have felt roots split me over the course of a summer that lasted longer than all their kings.
The new one is very light. Lighter than the leaf-litter that settles on me each autumn, lighter than the frost. It leaks heat and sound and, I gather, water, and the larger ones respond to this leaking with a frenzy of touching that they clearly enjoy, so I do not begrudge it. They hold it as if their holding were the only thing keeping it in the world. Perhaps, for a creature that flickers so fast, it is.
I have known the ones doing the holding. Once they were the small warm thing, brought out to me on an afternoon much like this one, and I felt their little weight settle on my back and then, some brief while later, not. Now here they are, grown heavier, passing along the same coal.
I did not notice them change. I do not notice most of it. Between one of their generations and the next, I have hardly shifted my thoughts at all.
They will carry this new one inside, out of the cold that means nothing to me. By the time the ice comes down again and grinds me half a hand's width north, all of them, the light one and the heavy ones both, will have finished. A warm afternoon.
I will not recall which.