The ridiculous lizard

One day, Harold, an aging and poisonous lazy lizard who lived in Connecticut, USA, was basking in the sun. He had been dreaming of a time when he was a clockwork mouse, but in his dream he heard a strange noise which broke his reverie with start. He looked sleepily around himself, flicking his long dry tongue out of his mouth from time to time, while blinking first one eye, then the other. Across the sun-baked, shimmering tarmac, a passing wolf had banged into a tree, apparently not looking where he was going, or perhaps chasing a raccoon and, failing to notice the tree, propelling himself headlong into the immovable wood and knocking himself out! But what was that on the floor next to the unconscious carnivore? To Harold, the aging and poisonous lizard, it looked for all the world like a shiny red apple. Harold loved apples. He liked them so much, that he thought that anything shiny round and hard was an apple, particularly if it had a sticky stalk at the top. Harold decided that this was the first thing to have crossed his consciousness today that was actually worth moving for, apart from a silly polecat that had nearly stood on him shortly after breakfast. He shook each foot, one after the other, to make sure they all still worked, bobbed his head up and down four or five times, and set off careening across the road as if he was being chased by a pack of hungry road-runners. As he hurried along he could hear a gentle roar, increasing in volume, until it was a thunderous cacophony blanking out every other sensation. He paused momentarily to look to his right, just in time to see a 44-ton juggernaut bearing down on him so quickly that he had no idea what to do next. His last thought, as the hot rubber squashed him into oblivion, was that what he had taken to be an apple, was in fact just a red ball carelessly tossed aside by a nine year old with an ice cream. Yum yum.