Something small and quick pressed itself against my western face this warm afternoon, a growth of metal and glass no thicker than a lichen, and now it screams whenever the soft ones brush past it.
I have known many pressures. The glacier that ground my northern shoulder flat took an age to do it and did not once announce itself. Roots that split my cousins open work in silence across a thousand summers. But this little bump wants everyone to know the instant a warm thing touches it, and the warm things oblige, pushing at it with one of their five soft prongs, then standing very still, humming, shifting their weight, staring at the flat rock they have propped upright and hollowed into a den.
I do not understand what the sound is for. A warm creature approaches, presses, waits. Another warm creature emerges from inside the den. They make more noise at each other, quick overlapping heat, and then one goes in and one goes away, and by the time I have registered any of it they are already gone, dried like the last rain.
They do this again and again. Press, wait, exchange, vanish. I have watched perhaps forty thousand such pressings since the metal grew here, which is to say I watched it happen once, blinked, and it was over.
The device will rust. The den will lean and fall. The soft things pressing at me now will not last the season, and neither will their small alarms. Something will replace them, quicker still, with a louder cry, and I will not notice the difference. I have an itch on my eastern face where the frost is working. I will attend to that.
It should be resolved by the next ice age.