Something soft came and poured a flat gray skin across the meadow above me, and the quick creatures have been standing on it since the shadows were long, which is to say for almost no time at all.
They have clustered, the warm little things, hundreds of them radiating their small heat in tidy rows, all turned to face the same direction the way grass leans in a wind I cannot feel. Two of them stood apart at the front and pressed their faces together. This seemed to matter enormously.
Sound came off the crowd, wet and high, water leaking from their eyes, and I have learned across the epochs that leaking eyes and the sky leaking rain are the same event: brief, warm, soon gone, leaving the ground a little damp and then not.
They have driven thin metal stakes into the soil above me to hold up cloth. The stakes will rust before I notice they were placed. They have laid down flat cut stems that were living this morning and will be brown by the time the moon has done anything worth mentioning.
They believe, I think, that today is different from the days on either side of it. To them the two who pressed faces are now one weight instead of two. It changes nothing about how they press upon me, which is: barely, and only for an afternoon.
The heat is thinning now. They are draining off the gray skin, back to wherever the warm quick things go to cool and vanish. The stakes will come out. The cloth will fold away. The grass will lean back the other direction.
By the next time the ice comes down and grinds this meadow smooth, I will not remember there was ever anyone standing here at all.