A great many of the small hot creatures have gathered inside a box, and they have arranged themselves along the two long walls the way frost gathers on the shaded side of a slope, in bands, unwilling to touch the middle. I have seen this pattern in ice. In ice it takes a winter. In them it lasts one damp evening and then they are grown and gone, so I did not trouble myself to watch closely.
The air in the box throbs. Something pounds a rhythm too quick for me to feel as anything but a faint continuous buzzing, the sort a swarm of the flying ones makes in the season when they are born and die between two of my breaths. Colored lights pass over their faces.
Each face is doing a great deal of work. I could not tell you what work; feeling is a thing the quick creatures carry and I have never managed to hold one long enough to learn the trick of it.
A few detach from the walls and move to the warm center, where they sway close together, radiating heat, and then spring apart as though the closeness had burned. Back to the cold walls. This happens again. It seems to matter enormously to them, the crossing of that little floor, the way a single afternoon of thaw seems to matter to the water racing off my flank.
By the time frost next finds this valley these will all be different creatures, and the box gone, and a forest perhaps, or a road, or the sea come inland again. I will not have finished the thought I began before they arrived. Something about the angle of the light.
It will keep.