There has been a warmth in the small square chamber above me for what amounts to an afternoon, and today the warmth is leaving. I felt it arrive as a very small thing, so light it barely troubled the joists, and I have felt it lengthen and grow heavier by the hour, wearing a groove in the boards where it paced, casting its shadow across my footings ten thousand times.
Now the little creature and the larger ones that tend it are carrying the room out of itself in armfuls. Odd. They are taking the soft objects and the flat squares that hung on the walls, and leaving the walls, which is the only part I would have thought worth keeping.
There is a great deal of the slow wet leaking they do from their faces. It happens near the doorway, several of them at once, gripping each other as though the ground were tipping. It is not. I have held this ground level through four ice sheets; it will not tip for them today. The wetness will dry before the next rain, as it always does.
Then the heat goes down the stairs and out, smaller than when it came, and the square room holds its shape around nothing, ticking as the sun crosses it, empty and warm and quiet.
New heat will move in within a season or two. It always does. The soft quick things pour through this hollow one after another, each certain its particular passage matters, each gone before I have settled the thought. By the time I next feel the cold come down hard from the north, I will not remember which of them wept in the doorway, or that any of them did.