There is a new hollow box propped against my ridge, one of many the quick soft things stack and abandon, and last evening a single warm creature was set down inside it, small and radiating heat, alone.
It moved from one corner of the box to another without settling, the way water hunts for the low place. It made the small salt-leak that the warm things make when the afternoon of their little lives turns strange; the same leak they make in a rain, and it dried by morning, as such things do.
I have watched this box fill and empty and fill again. A creature arrives with hollow crates, unpacks its clutter, glows there for a season or two, then loads the crates once more and is carried off, replaced by another that is certain the box was always its own.
To the creature the box was vast and echoing and terrible, and its heat pulsed fast against the walls, quick, quick, quick, the way a struck ember flares before it settles into being merely warm. I felt the tremor of it through the ground, a flutter no deeper than a sparrow landing.
By what it calls morning the little warmth had cooled to sleep in one chosen corner, curled small, having decided this hollow was, after all, a place a thing could be.
I will feel a thousand more warmths flicker through that box, arrive and unpack and dim and go, and I will not learn a single one of their names, and it will not matter, because before the next long cold comes grinding down from the north to scrape this whole ridge smooth, every box and every warmth will be a shadow that crossed me once, on an afternoon I have already half forgotten.