There is a hollow warm den here, and it has changed its mind about its own contents perhaps four times since the water carved this valley, which is to say very recently and very often.
A soft quick thing has lived in it for a long while, by their measure. I know her by the trench worn into the floor between the two stations she orbits, the hot box and the cold box, a path she has pressed a fraction deeper than the surrounding ground the way a slow trickle rounds a stone.
She is warmer than the others and moves without hurry, which I approve of, though her without-hurry is still a blur to me, a smear of heat crossing the room and back before I have gathered the thought to watch her.
Smaller warm things arrive in pulses, cluster around a flat slab, take on weight from bowls, and depart lighter. They come and go like the swallows that fill the cliff face and then are gone before the frost. She feeds them; the feeding is a kind of weather, a season that recurs.
Then one afternoon, briefly, the warm slow one is not there. The trench in the floor remains, worn and empty. The small ones return, and their heat is different, wetter about the faces, and they move slower for a while, pressing their palms flat to the cold counters as if the stone could tell them something.
It cannot. But I understand pressing. I have felt the whole weight of a mountain and outlasted it.
They will finish their wetness and dry, as all brief wetness dries. The trench will fill with dust.
And I will have forgotten the whole small season before the next ice comes down to grind this valley flat again.