There is a small hot thing beside the sleeping animal, and once each turning of the sky it makes a noise, and the animal thrashes up out of stillness as though struck by lightning, though nothing has struck it. I have watched this happen perhaps forty thousand times, which is to say for the space of one warm afternoon.
The creature does not want to rise. I can feel this in the slow reluctant weight of it, the way it presses back down and the small hot thing screams again and it presses down again, a little argument they have, the animal and the thing, that always ends the same way.
The thing wins. The animal stands, wobbling, warm, and goes out into the light to do whatever the soft quick ones do out there, which from here appears to be leaving and coming back, leaving and coming back, wearing a groove in the day.
What puzzles me, insofar as anything puzzles a thing that has felt continents move, is that the animal built the screaming thing itself. It could simply lie in the warmth until the warmth left it, as I do, as everything sensible does. Instead it fashioned a device whose only labor is to end rest sooner. They are in such a hurry to be somewhere that they have taught their own furniture to frighten them.
The animal will do this every morning until it does not, and then a new animal will do it, and the little hot thing will fall silent and cold under the dust of it.
By the time the ice comes down again to scrape this whole warm business flat, I will not remember that any of them woke at all.