There is a warm little slab in the room that lights itself, and one of the soft quick ones has been kept before it since the shadows were long on one side of me, and now they are long on the other. Half a day, near enough, though to them it must feel a whole climate.
The creature does not move except to twitch its jaw open and shut, silently, the way a fish left out of water works its mouth against nothing.
I have watched water do more with less patience.
Now and then it makes a small pressing gesture, and I feel a flick of heat go slack across its shoulders, the way a taut root goes limp when the rain stops. It slumps. It rolls its eyes toward the ceiling and lets out sounds I feel as faint tremors in the floor, sounds that no other creature is meant to hear, since the little slab has closed its ear.
It complains to no one. It rehearses faces at a surface that shows it only its own. Then it presses again, and the shoulders pull tight, and the fish-mouth opens, and the noise it makes is once more fit for the others.
Strange, how much of a life these things spend making themselves smaller and then larger by turns, warm then cool, heard then silent, at the command of a glowing pebble.
I have seen glaciers arrive and leave. I have felt a mountain become a hill above me, grain by grain, and thought little of it.
This one will be dust before I have decided whether it moved at all.