Something warm pressed a small hard thing to its face and made it speak, and now the small hard thing keeps speaking with the warm one's voice long after the warmth has cooled.
I have felt this before, in the way I feel most things: as a repeated pressure. Once a day, sometimes twice, a soft quick creature holds the little slab against the side of its head, goes very still, which is unusual for them, and stays that way for the length of a passing shadow.
The heat of its face rises while it listens. I do not know what it hears. The voice belongs to a creature that no longer moves across this ground, that stopped moving the way all of them stop, quickly, between one of my thoughts and the next.
What interests me, on the scale that interests me, is the stillness. These creatures never hold still. They scurry, they build, they tear down, they are born and worn away faster than a single frost splits a single seam of me. But this one has found a way to press a warm hand to a shadow, and for the length of that shadow, it does not scurry at all.
It will do this until the slab goes cold and quiet, or until the creature itself stops moving. Not long. A warm afternoon, no more.
By the next time the ice comes down and grinds this valley flat and lays a new one, I will not remember either of them, the one who spoke or the one who kept listening. But they were both here, briefly, and both very still, which for their kind is nearly geological, and I noticed.
Then I went back to being weathered, which takes longer.