Brody looked at the sketch on his easel. It was a charcoal drawing of an anonymous face, completely devoid of eyes, a nose, or a mouth. Only a pair of aviator sunglasses sat upon the bridge where a nose should have been, reflecting a sprawling, monochrome city beneath a blinding sun.
He remembered the day he drew it. The city had been suffering through an oppressive summer heatwave, the kind that made the tarmac melt and human tempers fray. Everyone he passed by looked exactly like this sketch: featureless, wiped clean by fatigue, and completely consumed by the urban landscape they inhabited. People no longer looked at one another. Instead, they merely reflected the pavement and the smog back into the world.
Brody dipped his thumb into the charcoal dust and smudged the edge of the jawline, deepening the shadows. He wanted to capture that precise feeling of losing one’s identity to a metropolis. In the reflection of the lenses, the minuscule spires and tall buildings proudly stood against a bleached sky, a testament to human achievement that simultaneously crushed the human spirit.
‘You’ve been staring at that for an hour,’ Claire said, walking into the studio with two cups of tea.
‘It’s the city,’ Brody replied, not taking his eyes off the glass lenses in the drawing. ‘It doesn’t just surround us. It replaces us.’
Claire set a cup down beside him and looked at the drawing. ‘It is rather haunting. It makes you wonder if there is anyone left behind the glasses at all, or if the city is all that remains.’ Brody took a sip of his tea, the warmth grounding him against the bleakness of his own creation. He picked up his pencil again, adding a few more frantic, hatched lines to the neck, anchoring the faceless entity to the grey reality of the capital city outside the window.
