A small one stopped in my shade this morning and did not move for the length of a bird's whole song, which for these quick creatures is a very long time indeed.
She held the glowing leaf up close to her face, the way the young of many animals will study a bright thing, and she watched it the way I watch the eastern sky before a frost: braced, hoping to be wrong. She was waiting for it to speak. It did not speak.
I know a great deal about waiting. I have waited whole winters for the sap to remember how to rise, and I have never once found the waiting unkind. But hers had teeth in it. Her breath came shallow, her shoulders drew up toward her ears like a squirrel sensing the hawk, and every little while her thumb touched the leaf and pulled the light down and let it go again, checking, checking, as a root checks the same stone it checked yesterday and finds it, still, a stone.
I do not understand what she was owed, or by whom, or why its not-arriving should press the color out of her face. Among my kind, a thing either comes to you across the seasons or it does not, and both are simply weather. But I have leaned over this same patch of moss for the better part of four hundred rings, and I have learned this much about the walking ones: they cannot bear to be unanswered.
They would rather be struck than left in the quiet.
She went away still holding it, still hoping. The moss where she stood is already lifting back up, slow, indifferent. By the time it has fully risen she will be an old woman, or gone, and the bird will sing that same song again, to whoever is standing here next.