A hollow was cut into the tall thing the quick creatures raise up, and now they let a small lit box slide up and down inside it, over and over, all through the warm hours. I have watched water take longer than this to carry off a single grain of me, and here is a whole crowd of them lifted the height of a river bank and set back down again in less time than a cloud needs to cross the sun.
They press against one another in the box, warm and breathing fast, all facing the same way as if the wall ahead of them were about to say something. It never does. It hums, it shudders, a soft weight of them rises, and then they spill out and scatter and are replaced by others exactly as warm, exactly as brief, and the whole thing begins again.
I cannot tell any one of them from the next. They are a flicker of heat that passes over a place, the way a lizard passes over me at noon and is gone before I have decided whether it happened.
Sometimes the box stops between the floors and holds them still, and their heat climbs, and their sounds grow sharp and rapid. This too passes. It always passes. Everything soft passes; that is the one reliable property of the soft.
I have seen the whole tall thing they built go up, and I expect, in some later cold, to see it come down. The box will stop rising. The heat will thin. And I will settle a little lower into the ground, as I have settled through every season of them, and by the next long ice I will not remember there was ever a box at all.