A warm thing has been coming to sit on my flat brother for what may be one whole season now, though I cannot be sure; the light has scarcely wheeled at all since I began attending.
My brother did not used to be flat. Once he was a slope of my own body, and then the quick creatures carved him and bound him with hard bright bone and stood him up on legs, which I found a curious ambition for a stone: to be lifted, to be sat upon, to be given the single narrow purpose of holding a warmth off the ground. He does not seem to mind. Stone rarely does.
The warmth arrives, settles, leaks a little heat into my brother's back, and makes small sounds. Sometimes water runs down the warmth's face, the same water that runs down mine in the wet season, and dries as quickly, and means, I must assume, the same nothing. Sometimes two warmths sit and press together and their heat pools and doubles.
Then the light moves the width of a fingernail and one of them is gone. I did not see it leave. They are always gone before I have properly turned my attention to them.
I have known this hollow a hundred million summers. I have been a mountain and a floor of a warm shallow sea and a mountain again. My brother will stand perhaps a hundred of the warmth's little afternoons before his hard bright bone weeps to rust and he lies back down into me, and the sitting will stop, and I will go on lying in the sun.
By the next ice I will not remember any of them sat here at all.