A cold, humming stone has stood beside me since the last few summers, taller than it is wide, lit from within like it swallowed a small trapped morning. The quick warm things come to it and stand very close, as I have seen them stand close to fire, and they feed it thin metal discs or press their soft appendages against its glass belly.
It rewards them, sometimes, by dropping a bright noisy pebble into its own mouth, and they crouch, reach in, and carry the pebble away as though it were an egg.
I have watched this exchange perhaps ten thousand times in what, for me, is the length of one slow exhale. What interests me is the ones the glass stone refuses. A warm thing will press, and press, and strike the stone with the flat of its limb, and shake it, radiating that particular heat they give off when their brief afternoon has gone wrong.
The stone does not move. Here, at last, I felt a flicker of kinship. It, too, has decided simply to remain, and let the soft one exhaust itself against a patience it cannot outlast.
Once, a warm thing shook it so hard the glowing stone tipped forward and lay upon the small one, and there was much heat and much noise, and then other warm things came fast and carried both away.
By spring the humming stone was gone, and another stood in its place, brighter, colder, full of new pebbles. They come and go like frost. I will keep sitting.
The glass ones always tip over eventually; I have simply not yet finished watching the first one fall.