Urban Habit

The city was a small version of itself in a bigger version of itself, the lifesize version of itself. Buildings sat in buildings, the small versions made of gray clay, their windows being painted on by tiny hands covered in inks and paints and glue. Each child’s building became their home for weeks; Cynthia in the art store, Belle in the AI office. And each tiny sculpture of that home was made in loving detail, the kind of detail only eyes wide with wonder at a wider world could imagine. Some details were imagined, like the sparkly-painted dragon living in Anne’s grocery store; some were real and important only in the mind of a child, like the conversation captured in clay between an elderly couple in Andrea’s real-estate office.