The soft quick things have gathered in a ring on my flat cousin, the one they cut square and laid on the floor, and they have made the room dark on purpose, which strikes me as a great deal of effort to arrive at a condition I hold most nights without trying.
They are very warm and their small warmths tremble. Ten fingers press a smooth disk and push it in tiny nervous arcs, back and forth, back and forth, the way a rootlet worries at my seams over a thousand summers, though these creatures accomplish nothing so lasting; the disk will wear no groove before they tire of it. One of them speaks into the dark. The dark, as is its custom, holds its peace.
They are, I gather, calling to something that has already finished being warm. I know this state well. Most of what has ever touched me has cooled and gone quiet and become, in time, a little more of me: the fern, the slow shellfish, the great heavy beasts that lay down against my flank and did not rise.
None of them ever spoke afterward, and none of them, in my recollection, wished to. Being still is not a hardship. It is only the rest of the afternoon.
A candle gutters. A creature gasps as though the room has answered, though it was merely a draft, the same draft that will one day carry me off grain by patient grain. They clasp hands. They are so frightened of the quiet, these brief hot things, that they have come here to knock on it.
They will be quiet themselves soon enough, and better at it than they fear.
By the next frost I will not recall they were here at all.