There is a warm swarm gathered around the flat cold slab, and they have been at it for the length of two dried puddles now, which is to say no time at all, which is to say forever by their reckoning.
They have arranged themselves in a loose ring, the way lichen arranges itself, though lichen does it in silence and takes a decade to disagree. These quick things disagree constantly. One of them, the hot restless one nearest the window, has stood and sat four times, and each rising sends a small tremor through the floor that I feel the way I feel a distant hoof.
Another has not moved at all, only leaned, radiating that low steady heat of a creature that has decided to survive the afternoon by playing dead. I approve. That is nearly the correct speed.
They make sounds at one another, rapid pressure-waves that rise and sharpen when the light in the slab changes. Something is due, I gather. A deadline, they call it, and they say the word the way roots say the word for winter, though winter I have met perhaps a thousand times and it has never once failed to end.
Now the swarm scatters, having accomplished the thing they came to accomplish, which as far as I can measure was the generation of heat and noise in a fixed spot for a fixed while. The warm patches cool. The floor goes still. The slab goes dark.
They believe this mattered. Perhaps it did, to them, in the brief wet flicker they were given.
By the time the ice comes down again to smooth this whole valley flat, I will not recall that any of them were ever warm.