Once upon a weary wasteland there lived a hermit. Amidst clouds of swirling dust and sand sat his shack. Erected under the eave of an obliging outcrop of stone, he was relatively sheltered from the storms which ravaged the plains around his home.

Nibbled at by decay's ceaseless gastric enterprise, his shack is seen to be constructed of corrugated iron, mostly, with wings and addendums of wood, plasterboard and lost scraps of material gathered from the wasteland. Within, he keeps his precious things; thimbles, kisses, lightbulbs, soil samples, SIM cards, iron keys, compliment slips, flower pressings, initialed handkerchiefs, things called Flash Drives and pages of ancient texts bound together in leather leaves. It is in this 'book', which he treasures above all other things, that he collects his stories, written in a thousand languages and found amongst the dunes, under rocks, in caves and sitting on velvet cushions in many a mirage.

He sits, back cramped and eyes squeezed into focus under the inconsistent light of a gas burner. He undoes the willow twine from around his hallowed tome, peels away the protective leaves of ancient skin and pours over the forgotten words, the woven patterns of consciousness wrought in ancient inks and committed to the precious paper to be remembered forever. He smiles his crooked, rotten smile and loses himself in the words, slipping away to a time and place that may never have existed, to spend time with people who may never have lived, doing things that might never have happened...