A river of the little hot shells has stopped flowing on the flat black stone the quick ones poured across my valley some seasons ago, and I confess it is the most interest they have shown me in ages.
Ordinarily they streak past too fast to properly witness, a smear of heat and hum gone before I have registered the leading edge of it. But today the river has thickened and set, shell pressed to shell, each one trembling with a small trapped warmth, and now I can actually look at them.
They flare brighter, these ones. They make a great deal of noise, a high patterned blaring, one shell answering another, the way I imagine birds must have done in the wet forests before the ice took them. I have felt this heat rise off the black stone many times and mistaken it for a warm afternoon.
Now I understand it was only them, waiting, cooking gently in their own impatience.
They will not last, of course. None of them do. A few will still be warm by evening, most will have cooled and gone, and the river will loosen and drain away down the valley to wherever it is the quick things flow. What strikes me, in the leisurely way things strike me, is how hard they push against the stopping.
The blaring. The little flares of heat. As though the being-still were the unnatural thing, and the rushing the truth of them.
I have been still since before this valley was a valley. It is comfortable. They should try it longer. But they are already draining away, the noise thinning, the warmth fading from the black stone, and by the time the next ice comes grinding down to smooth all this flat again, I will not remember that the little shells were ever here at all.