Some clever hand has polished a slab of my old cousin until it went smooth as still water, and now the quick warm things gather in front of it and stop.
I know this stone. It was pressure and heat once, same as me, before the soft creatures did their fast little work on it, grinding and grinding in what could not have taken more than a season. Now it hangs on the wall of the box they sleep in, and it does a strange trick: it throws the light back so cleanly that a creature standing before it seems to meet another of its kind, exactly its own warmth, exactly its own speed, mirrored breath for breath.
They love this. They come to it many times in a single one of their afternoons. The small one pulls at the fur on its head, opens its mouth to show the little white pebbles inside, turns this way and that, and appears greatly troubled by what the polished stone reports.
It stands closer. It touches its own face. Whatever it is looking for, it does not find, and it comes back the next day to look again, as though the answer might have settled overnight, the way silt settles.
I have watched water do the same trick in a puddle for longer than these creatures have existed, and no puddle ever asked the sky to admire it back.
They will wear soft grooves in the floor with all their coming and going, and one day the box will fall, and the polished stone will crack, and the light will go back to landing wherever it pleases. A shadow, briefly troubled by its own shape.
It will pass before I have turned the thought fully over.