A small warm creature stopped near me this morning and, at the first wetness from the sky, unfolded a black wing over its head that it had been carrying folded under one limb.
I have known wetness. Wetness is my oldest visitor. It comes down, it pools, it finds the smallest seam in me and works there, patiently, for ten thousand years, until one day a piece of me is simply somewhere else. I do not object. This is the arrangement. Water and I have an understanding older than anything that has ever crawled across my back.
But the creature objected. That was the marvel. It held the little wing up against the sky with one trembling limb and hunched beneath it, guarding the top of its soft self as though a few drops falling for the length of an afternoon could unmake it. I wanted to tell it: yes, the water will take you apart.
Not today. But it will. It takes everything apart. I have watched it take mountains, and mountains did not think to bring a wing.
The wind turned the little wing inside out, and the creature made a quick sharp noise and struggled with it, and its heat spiked with something I do not have a word for, some fast bright panic that flared and was gone. Then the wetness stopped. The creature folded its wing away, satisfied, victorious over an afternoon.
I have felt perhaps four such afternoons since the sea last stood where I stand. The creature will feel one more, or a thousand more, and then the water will have it too, wing and all, and I will not have noticed it leaving.