There is a warm creature that comes to me each morning with a small clutch of hard bright things, and it fumbles them against my face in a great state, one of them scraping, missing, scraping, until at last the right sliver bites into the slot that other creatures ground into me over the span of a single frost.
The bright things sing when they are dropped, which is often. I have known the sound perhaps ten thousand times, which is to say I heard it once, faintly, in the long afternoon I am presently having.
The creature is afraid to be without them. I feel the heat of its hand pat itself all over, pocket after pocket, in a spasm of the quick panic these soft things suffer, and then the flood of ease when the little metal teeth are found. It seems they open something. A den, perhaps. A hollow the creature crawls into when the sky darkens and out of when it lightens, dark, light, dark, light, faster than I can attend to.
I do not understand why so much fear should hang on a few slivers of cold ore. The ore itself remembers being deep and molten and pressed under mountains, and it will be deep again, and the little grooves filed so carefully into its edge will be smoothed away by nothing more than being held.
Once, in what I take to be the day before this one, a set slipped from a warm hand into the grass beside me, and lay there quietly for a season while the creature made its brief distressed noises and went away and did not come back. The grass grew over them. They rested, at last, as still as I am.
I forgot them almost at once.