Two Tanks, Northbound

Traffic out here is rare enough that every vehicle is a character, and yesterday the road produced its plot twist: a low-loader ahead of me carrying two armored vehicles, sand-and-green, strapped down like museum pieces on a school trip. For twenty minutes it was just us, the truck, the tanks, the Niva, a convoy of eras doing ninety across the flat.

I stayed behind at map-reading distance, one hand on the wheel, the paper map sliding on the dash, and let the scene do what scenes like this do to a person with my reading history. Hardware moving through steppe is the oldest sentence in this landscape's grammar; only the fonts change.

The overtake, when it came, was long and formal, a full minute alongside tracks and road wheels at eye level. The driver lifted two fingers off the wheel in the international sign for we both exist. Then the road was empty again for an hour, which out here is the normal ending.