Found at the terminus of parking spaces in strip malls and office lots, the concrete parking bumper is cast in a single trapezoidal form, gray, faintly ribbed, and anchored by two rebar stakes driven through its shoulders into the asphalt below. It does not move. It does not ask to be noticed. Its entire purpose is to arrive at the exact moment a bumper would otherwise not, and to absorb that moment quietly, without complaint, for decades.
Over time it accumulates a biography written in scuff marks: a smear of white paint here, a chip of chrome trim there, the faint black kiss of rubber where someone misjudged the distance in the rain. No two bumpers wear identically, though all wear the same way, from the middle outward, like a stone worn by a river that only flows twice a day, at nine and at five. It is rarely painted, and when it is, the paint fades to the color of an old scar. Specimens near shopping carts show additional trauma. The bumper does not resent this. It was built for exactly this indignity, and it performs its function with the flat, unbothered patience of something that has never once been asked how its day is going.