not asleep

 The snow collapsed as a body was thrown onto it. Some unseen part crumpled, then melted, then refroze as unseen heat flowed outwards. An ephemeral impression was left, as close to a phantom as you could describe it, yet clearly detectable in those moments, if you had the right equipment. If not, you might feel so little that it is passed off as a feeling, not a thing. An error in judgement. An anomaly.

 The glass cracked, but it did not break. Curious things, like snakes or worms or particularly alive strings, wished to make themselves known. They dug themselves in from the ridges of the cup and towards the center - but stopped. The solid glass became liquid became solid again in an instant. Their - apparently once quite joyful - lives splayed themselves against beams of light, as dead as the glass was a moment ago. But alive, as a portrait of a doe represents something alive, paused in a single moment. Their lives, no, their deaths, are not in your purview.

 You drop a teaspoon of sugar into your tea. Suddenly these granular things - as lifeless as they can be, simple, explainable by the same laws that govern the motion of everything else - are tugged by invisible strings in the depths. Torn apart to waltz a thousand more dances out of your view. Experiencing a thousand joys as each piece becomes a thousand, becomes something not quite as understandable.

 If you were to taste the tea again, you'll know that the sugar is still in there. Twenty two grams exactly.

 Rate of vaporization. Quite low, for a solid.

 The teacup is as proof against leaks as it ever was. If there is foul play here, you do not see it.

 So it is with elves.

Elves

 A child better sees elves than a man does. Men are hardened against all the small wonders of the world.

 Their joys and sorrows are not ours. Elves are both big and small. An elf does not perish when he is split, not exactly. About as much as a rock does when a rock is split - it just becomes a thousand small rocks.

 But men, burled ogres as they are, will turn a thousand small elves into a real death.

 Their joys and sorrows are not ours. Elves are of those things, not ours. The worlds that pass by us in a moment, that intersect with us in small snapshots, overlap and subsume us, but go ignored. The moment that a man's shadow in heat passes into the snow can be missed. The paths that the glass-snakes choose are waved away as possessing no useful thought beside them. The daemons that take away each miniscule piece out of our sight are dismissed in favor of hard, material facts.

 We now know that these things are of great scientific importance. They can be understood and used and modeled and predicted.

 Why then, are we not elves?