Room on the Warm Stone
"Why is my breath turning into little clouds?" Cato asked. He and Rosa were walking the moss path between the old trees. Lanterns of light hung in the branches and swung a little. Rosa lifted her one straight ear and turned it slowly. The air had changed. It was thin and cold, and it smelled like stone. Cato pushed his hands deep into his sleeves. Frost was climbing the ferns, drawing white feathers along every green edge. "It came early tonight," he said. Rosa hopped ahead, then back, then ahead again, until Cato followed her off the path and under the low branches.
Rosa stopped beside a wide flat stone in a clearing. Cato laid his palm on it and felt the whole afternoon still inside, held there like soup in a bowl. The stone was warm. Around it the frost stopped, as if it did not want to come closer. Cato sat down and let the warmth climb up through him. Rosa settled against his knee, one ear up, one ear flopped. Above them the stars looked wide awake. Cato watched his breath go up in slow clouds and thought the whole forest had gone quiet to listen to the cold.
Something moved at the edge of the stone. A beetle, black and slow, was walking toward the warmth with its legs stiff. Cato shifted over. Then a moth landed, wings frosted grey, and could not fold them properly. Rosa nosed a curl of leaf aside to make a flat spot for it. "There's room on the stone. Come closer," Cato said. The moth crept in. More came after it, the way guests come to a kitchen door: two grey snails, a beetle with a green back, a spider the size of a seed, a small brown toad with cold toes.
Soon the middle of the stone was busy and Cato was sitting near the edge. The cold found his back and pressed there. Rosa noticed. She hopped behind him and leaned her warm side against his spine, and Cato leaned back into her. Together they made a wall. Cato gathered fallen bark and propped the pieces up like a little roof, leaning them against each other over the snails and the moth. The warmth stayed under it instead of drifting off into the branches. "There's room on the stone. Come closer," he told a late beetle, and moved his foot aside.
Then the wind turned. Cato felt it first on his face, on the cold tip of his nose. It came from the south, slow and damp, sliding through the trunks. The frost feathers on the ferns went soft. Water began to tick from the branches, one drop, another drop, a hundred drops. It was rain, and it was warm. Rosa's whiskers shone with it. Cato held out both hands and let the drops fill them, and they were the temperature of bathwater. He laughed once, quietly, so as not to startle anybody sleeping under the bark roof.
The forest made room for the rain. The moss drank it. The ferns bowed and let it run off their tips. Cato lifted the bark roof away so the moth could see, and the moth opened its wings all the way at last, dry and grey and enormous. Steam rose off the warm stone in little ghosts. The beetles turned around. The toad hopped down into the wet moss and sat there looking pleased. One by one they went back out into the mild dark, and nobody hurried, and nobody said goodbye, and the stone grew roomy again.
Cato lay back on the stone with his head near Rosa. Rain touched his forehead and slid into his hair, warm as a hand. The lanterns of light between the branches had gone blurry and gold. Everything smelled like wet bark and green things waking up in the wrong season. "There's room on the stone. Come closer," Cato said, and Rosa shuffled over until her charcoal-blue fur was against his cheek. Her heart went fast and small under her ribs. Cato counted the drips off one leaf above him. He got to eleven, and then lost count, and did not mind.
The rain thinned to almost nothing. Mist came up out of the moss and lay down over the clearing like a blanket somebody had shaken out. Cato's eyes were heavy. He could feel the stone's warmth under his shoulders and Rosa's warmth along his arm and the mild air on his face, all three at once, which seemed like plenty. He reached over without looking and found her paw, small and dry in his palm, and closed his fingers round it. Rosa left it there. Somewhere above them the trees went on dripping, slower and slower, all the way down into sleep.
