There is a cold box in the warm cave now, and it hums. This is new. When I first felt the cave laid down over me, there was no cold box, and before that there was ice a mile thick sitting on my back for an age, so I know cold, I have worn cold, and I find the little box's ambition charming: one square of winter, kept alive by trembling, in a room the soft ones have deliberately warmed.
They open it. A slab of light falls out, and cold breathes onto their feet, and they stand in it, one hand on the door, looking in at the frost the way a creature looks at weather it does not trust. Then they close it. Then, in what to me is the same instant, they open it again.
They do this many times in an afternoon, which is to say across their whole brief lives, staring into the little winter as if the ice a mile deep might, this time, have decided to say something back.
I have felt seas arrive and leave. I have felt the mountain above me lower itself, grain by grain, into the valley. So I can tell them, if they could hold still long enough to hear it, that the cold does not stay. Nothing they build to hold the cold will hold it. The box will stop trembling; the frost will breathe out one last time and be gone; the warm quick ones will scatter faster than frost does.
But that is a long thought, and they are a short weather, and the light keeps falling out and folding back in, out and in, a small bright pulse in the dark of the cave, already fading from me before I have finished noticing it hummed.