The ground has been trembling since dark, a low steady heartbeat pushed up through my roots from the crumbling brick building beside me, and I have decided it is not a threat. The walking ones stream into it by the hundreds, thin and pale in the cold, wearing very little, and I lose them into the doorway the way I lose leaves into November wind.
Inside there is light that stutters, red then nothing then white then nothing, and a sound so large it moves the small stones at the base of my trunk. They stay in there for a very long time. Longer than any storm I have weathered. When the sun finally clears the rooftops one of them comes out and stands beneath me, blinking, hollowed, and rests a hand flat against my bark as though I am the only steady thing left in the turning world.
I hold still for her, as I hold still for everything.
I have felt this before. Not the sound, the sound is new, but the shape of it: the young ones gathering in the dark to shake something out of themselves, some heat that will not let them sleep, some grief they have no roots to hold. They danced under me when the building beside me had a different purpose and a worse one, and they danced under me after it fell quiet, and they dance now, in the ruin, because ruins let more moonlight through.
She will not come back. They rarely do. But the trembling will return next dark, and the dark after, with new pale ones I will never learn to tell apart.
I will feel their heartbeat in my roots long after the last of them has gone still in the ground I am still drinking from.