The soft quick creatures come to this cracked structure in a stream, all in one autumn, to be frightened on purpose. I do not understand fright, but I have felt it: a hundred small warmths hurrying past me faster than a rockfall, hearts drumming so quick they are almost a hum, all pressed into a wooden box that has been standing here for barely the length of a good frost.
They believe the box is old. I remember when there was no box, when the ground it clings to was seabed, then swamp, then dust, then this. The box will be dust again before I have shifted my weight.
Inside, they say it is inhabited by things that have died and lingered. This makes me warm with amusement, in the slow way a stone warms at noon. Everything they fear lasted no time at all. A ghost, as I understand it, is a creature that has been gone perhaps a single afternoon and cannot accept how brief it was.
I have watched entire kinds of life arrive, cover the world, and vanish without a single one of them coming back to rattle a chain about it.
They scream in the dark, cling to one another, and then run out into the cold and laugh, their warmth already fading, their small alarms already dried like rain on my face.
Next year fewer will come, and the box will lean. Then it will fall, and roots will take the boards, and the soft quick things will build another box somewhere to be afraid in.
I will still be here, holding my one warm thought, which I have not yet finished, and will not for some time.