Frankly Speaking

What Pegman Saw is a weekly fiction prompt utilizing Google Maps. The assignment is to write a story–150 words or less–based upon your own street view tour, using the location link provided.

Today Pegman takes us to the . Click on the blue frog at the bottom of the page to read more entries in this challenge.

Title: Frankly Speaking
Words: 150

Sam Taylor stood on the sidewalk at the edge of the waterpark and gazed up at the Burj Khalifa tower. A soft flash of light to his right caught his attention. He turned to look and saw the faint outline of an old man walking away into the darkness beyond the next light pole.

Sam looked back at the tower and up, up, up—2,700 feet to the very top.

“It is impressive, yes?”

Sam jerked his head to his right. A man stood beside him. “Keeeeriist, you scared me!”

“I’m sorry, I thought you saw me earlier.”

“You were walking away.”

“And now I’m here. Perhaps we are kindred spirits?”

“You come here often?”

“Only once. In 1957, shortly before I died.”

Sam forced himself to take a closer look at the apparition in front of him. “You look like Frank—”

“Lloyd Wright. My skyscraper was twice this size.”

Notes

• In 1956 Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled plans for a skyscraper that was 4 times the height of the Empire State building. Resembling a shard of glass embedded in the ground, The Illinois was to be built in Chicago and would contain 528 floors at a height of 5,280 feet. The Burj Khalifa owes a great deal to FLW’s visionary design.
• In 1957 the government of Iraq gave Frank Lloyd Wright a commission to design a new Opera House. Wright’s Plan for Greater Baghdad was never realized after King Faysal and his family were murdered in a military coup in 1958. The new regime abandoned the project and Wright died in 1959.