A cave has appeared on the flat place where the grass once tried and failed to grow, and inside it the soft quick creatures have gathered to suffer in the dark on purpose.
They sit on little metal perches, each one, and they turn their legs in furious circles, and the circles go nowhere. I have watched much go nowhere in my time. The glacier that scraped my northern face went somewhere, eventually, over a span I still remember fondly. These creatures do not move at all.
Their heat rises off them in sheets, their breath quickens, water runs from their skin the way it runs from me in a thaw, and yet when the noise stops they are precisely where they began. I find this the most industrious stillness I have ever observed.
There is a loud one at the front who barks, and the many pedal harder, as though the barking were a weather they could outrun. The whole business lasts perhaps a fraction of one warm afternoon. Then they gather their little cloth things and their glowing pebbles and pour back out into the light, wet and trembling and, I think, satisfied.
They will do it again. They do everything again, urgently, in the sliver of time they are given, which is roughly the interval between two of my slower breaths.
A root is presently working its way into a crack along my eastern side. In another few thousand years it may split me. That is a matter worth attending to. This cave of spinning legs I will have forgotten before the next ice sheet comes to smooth the whole valley flat, and takes the little metal perches with it, still going nowhere, faster now.