I is bored at work

The wind started picking up and the hairs on her arms stood up straight. Ellen rubbed her arms and absentmindedly ran her fingertips over the tiny bumps and follicles. Balancing on one foot, she shuffled the other one back and forth on the sandy gravel producing a musical rhythm like maracas or a symphony of cicadas. She paused for a moment, looking out over the cliff. Pinching her fingernails together, she plucked a tiny hair from her chin; a satisfying habit that her friend had once advised her was not at all becoming.

Staring above from this great height, the city looked static and uninhabited like a child's diorama. The scene triggered a flashback to a time in middle school when she had had to build a scaled replication of her neighborhood. Her project had been an artistic but sloppy affair, while her neighbor and classmate Amy's model had had the professional precision of an architect's. Amy had glued tiny houses from a Monopoly game onto cut squares of fake grassy turf and used strips of dark grey sandpaper for the roads. Amy's model had a neat, tight look. She was the type of girl who recieved "A's." Ellen, by contrast, was used to B+s.

As the sun started to lower, the city lights blinked on one by one giving the sky a pearlized glow. She checked her phone for the time and then, surveying the scene below one last time, she went back to her bike and clumsily pushed the kickstand up with her flip-flop.

To be continued?