Regressing

If I were a young child I could take all the books piled on this table and construct myself a city; the huge volumes would become the unshakeable iron foundations laid down by Italian immigrants and expanded on by Native American skywalkers in order to send these monoliths soaring into the clouds. The narrow streets would have little shreds of paper representing bustling businessmen, hot-dog cart operators, paperboys in those classic early 20th-century hats now appropriated by hipsters; those shreds would be boarding buses or private shreds stretched to look like buses but smaller. I'd have to imagine a subway system under all this, because I can't very well dig little holes into the desk. I'd get thrown out the twelfth floor of the library. Toward the edges of the table would be my other sheets, laid out in strips to form beaches in the mind, with little shapeless crumpled beach umbrellas and little shapeless fat sunbathers. Each of the beaches would be named after what is written on the paper: Penicillin Beach, PDH Complex Beach, Murein Recycling Pathway Beach, Illegible Scrawl Beach. But back to the towers: these spires would be topped off with huge hat domes and pen and pencil antennae; I could even lay out the books such that ledges could form so the tourist shreds of paper, in the big city for the first time, could take the elevators inside and look down from these observation decks. What would they see? The grand sweep of the commercial canyons, little self-contained bubbles partitioned by the brown wooden streets; above them the great light of the several dozen alternating-current halogen suns in stark perpetual midday glare, the spines of the edges of the buildings spelling out their contents in towering letters: "Barons, Brokers and Buyers", "Modernization of the Indian Sugar Industry", "Modern Organic Chemistry" stretching out for blocks on end. Little paper helicopters whirring overhead, held aloft by the hand of me, lording over what I would have created were I not so throughly tamed and institutionalized and uninteresting.

Consider: "cake."