In response to a series of pension reforms by French president Emmanuel Macron, municipal waste collectors began a strike earlier this month, leaving over 10,000 tons of trash to collect on the streets of Paris. Viral videos have documented the City of Light transformed into a strange landscape of black bags, abandoned toilets, strewn furniture, and cardboard boxes. This week, write a story in which a set of events triggers a city’s landscape to change dramatically. The setting can be based on real events or surrealistic, as with Donald Barthelme’s short story “The Balloon,” [3] published in the New Yorker in 1966.