There is a small warm creature that lives on the counter, and unlike the soft quick ones it does not scurry. It waits, as I wait, which is the only kinship I have felt in a long age. Then one of the quick ones comes near, presses a face into its side, and the small creature hums and glows and throws off heat for a spell so brief I would not notice it if I were not already looking.
I have watched the quick ones do a curious thing while they stand before it. They stop. All that darting, all that panic they carry from the moment they warm into being to the moment they cool, and here they hold still, staring into the humming box the way root-water stares into stone, waiting on a change that to me arrives before it has begun.
The heat inside it is nothing. I have held the heat of a whole summer for four thousand summers and thought little of it. I have been pressed under ice taller than their tallest weather-piles, and I did not hum, and I did not glow. This creature cannot hold a warmth past the length of a single held breath, and neither can the quick ones who feed it, and I suppose that is why they understand each other so well.
They will build a faster one, and a faster one after that, each shaving another shadow-flicker off the wait, chasing a stillness they already had and could not bear. By the time the next cold sheet grinds down over all of this, softening the counter and the box and the quick warm faces into gravel, I will have quite forgotten there was ever anything here in such a hurry to be warm.