A whole meadow of the soft quick ones arrived overnight, the way mushrooms do after rain, and they have brought their own weather with them: a thudding in the ground so steady and so slow-fast that at first I mistook it for a shy young earthquake, before I understood it was merely them, being loud on purpose.
They have driven metal poles into the soil above me, which tickled, and stretched bright skins over them against a sun that will not remember any of this. Beneath those skins they gather in the tens of thousands, all facing one direction, all bouncing at once, warm and damp and shrieking, pressed so tight I can feel their heat come down through the dirt like a summer that lasts an evening.
I have felt herds before. Mammoth passed over me once, unhurried, and left less trace. These leave more: little glittering husks, flattened cans, a shoe. The rain of their trampling. I gather it is very important to them, whatever it is, because they weep and lift their arms and hold the glowing rectangles above their heads as though offering the small lights up to something.
Then the sun comes twice, and they are simply gone. The poles come out. The skins fold away. The meadow lies flat and quiet with its new scatter of shiny debris, which the true weather, the patient kind, will spend a few of my heartbeats pressing down into the ground to keep.
They were the warmest thing to happen here since the last herd, and nearly as brief.
I expect the grass will have straightened before I have decided what the noise was.