There is a new thing standing in the warm dry cave where the quick creatures come to gather their food, and it lights up and makes small sounds, which tells me it belongs to the same restless family as the humming boxes and the glass that glows. The soft ones approach it one at a time, holding objects, and there begins a little dance I have now watched perhaps ten thousand times, which for me is roughly the space of one comfortable thought.
The creature waves a thing over a glowing patch. It waits. It waves again. Its heat rises; I can feel the flush of it even from where I sit near the door, holding up my corner of the wall. Something displeases the box, and the creature turns its head left and right, faster and faster, searching for one of its own kind to come and touch the box and make it forgive them.
This searching, this small frantic turning, seems to me the whole of what the creatures do. They rush toward a machine to save time, and then stand pinned before it, leaking warmth, waiting.
I have seen the water do more in a single winter than these boxes will do in all their brief burning lives. I have felt a root split me slowly over ninety thousand years, patient as I am, and that root is gone now, and I remain.
The box will glow for a season, perhaps two, and then go dark and cold, and the quick ones will haul it away and stand a newer one in its place, and be just as flushed and just as fast. I will not notice when it happens.
I will be thinking about the rain.