The warm quick things have been gathering on my broad grey back since the sun went down, which is to say for no time at all. They arrived stacked in their rolling metal shells and now the shells sit cooling in rows across my chest, ticking faintly as the heat leaves them, and I feel this the way I feel a light frost settle: a small cool weight, come and going.
Inside the box they built against my northern edge there is a great deal of movement. I know it by the trembling that travels down through the packed dirt into my shoulders, a fast shivering pulse, quicker than rain, quicker even than the woodpeckers who once drummed on the fallen tree here for a summer and then were dust.
The soft ones are hot tonight. Hotter than usual. They press together and apart, together and apart, warming a patch of me I had thought would stay cold until the next long winter, which is to say the real winter, the mile of ice.
One of them has come out to lie against me directly. A single warm creature, spilled from the light, holding very still. I have felt this before, many times, always the same shape: the slack limbs, the heat leaking away into me, the long stop. To the soft ones I think this is a great and terrible event. For me it is a brief wetness that will dry.
Now the sky is greying at one edge. The heat is thinning off my back. Soon the shells will roll away and the trembling will stop and I will be cold and quiet again, as I was, as I am. A pleasant enough afternoon.
I will have forgotten it by the ice.