“I’ll draw a word”

It was his favorite game the spring he turned five. Every Tuesday while his brother had tennis lessons, Sebastien and his mom played the Chalk Word game. Mariel grabbed the bucket of sidewalk chalk from the trunk and they tried to cover as much of the empty concrete wading pool as they could in the one hour lesson. Sebastien would draw an image and then she would write the word in bubble letters. After a few weeks he wasn’t interested in creating birds or clouds, he wanted to draw only words. APUL. TENESS. TRE. His mom was left out of the game but she didn’t mind sitting at the picnic table catching up on emails. She’d look up occasionally, checking the court then the pool. Mariel never noticed Sebastien’s growing fascination with the graffiti on the clubhouse wall. She didn’t see his letters becoming more tag-like.
Sebastien didn’t know the word for it but he saw a future where the world was an endless canvas.