The soft quick one has been warmer than usual this stretch, hotter around the face, leaking salt-water at the eyes, which is what the quick ones do when weather moves through them too fast to ride out.
Something has ended, apparently. It gathers small objects from a flat surface into a box: a framed square that emits the light of other quick ones, a cup, a wilted green thing it kept alive on the ledge beside me. All morning the others cluster near it, pressing their warm bodies briefly against its warm body, a habit I have observed the quick ones perform whenever one of them is about to move somewhere else.
They make the loud pulsing sounds. They give small folded gifts. The heat between them rises and holds and rises.
I do not follow what has changed. The room is the same room. The light through the glass falls at the same angle it fell this morning and will fall tomorrow. Whatever place these creatures gathered in each day, it did not weigh anything, it left no mark, it was made entirely of them being near each other very fast for a little while.
Now the one with the box walks to the door and turns and looks back at the empty flat surface for a long moment, longer than the quick ones usually hold still, nearly two whole breaths.
Then it is gone through the door, and the light keeps falling, and by the time the water carves the next groove in me none of this will have happened at all.