Some of the burrowing things have gone deep this season, deeper than the roots go, hollowing a warm pocket beneath me and lining it with hard cold metals I have not tasted since the last time the mountains bled fire. I feel their little drills as a tickle, an itch that lasts an afternoon of their kind, which is to say no time, which is to say already forgotten as it happens.
They have brought things down there. Stacks of sealed vessels, water gathered and hidden away as though water were a thing that could be kept, as though I have not watched every drop that ever fell find its way back down to me eventually, patient as I am. They pile up warmth and light in a hole and wait. I know waiting. I have made a study of it. These are not serious about it.
What tickles me most, in the slow way a thing can tickle over ten thousand of their heartbeats, is that they have gone underground to survive the ending of things. They have come to hide inside me. Me, who felt the sky go dark and the seas boil off and freeze and fill again, who wore three separate skins of ice and shrugged each one loose.
They think the ending is coming. Sweet quick warm heavy things. The ending came already, many times, and I am the ground it left behind.
They will grow old down there, or afraid, and climb back into the light, and the burrow will fill with water and then with silt and then with me.
By the next time the ice comes down I will not recall which afternoon it was they dug.