The Lovetrucker baked in the sun’s oven and his eyes closed to the world around. Hemoglobin crystallized slowly in gravelly veins and his heart turned to stone. Black birds, attracted by the apathy of rock, settled on sandstone skin and made themselves at home.

It seemed like years, and probably was, before he finally blended in with his environment. Now more it than him, this pile of petrified thoughts and vitrified memories crumbled into a landscape of lost promise in a forgotten valley. The birds clawed and pecked at the loose mortar, dislodging the fine dust of despair that blew away in the belly of the hot wind.

Successive cycles of drought and flood buffeted the half alive rock, filling the cracks with the residue of good intentions and providing enough moisture for colonising plants to unfurl their tendrils. At some point in the future this lump of earth could stretch its limbs and stand but until that time sleeps and dreams of itself. Almost unnoticed, a tiny truck drives by, intent on only that which lies directly ahead