What's a calque you say? Essentially it's a linguistic term for a loan phrase from another language that is directly translated. Some of them sound a little off when you really look at the individual words, for instance, Flea Market come from the french term for "Market with fleas" which sounds a little less quaint for some reason.
Look at the various calques for skyscraper in other languages and pick one as the title for a piece. I like the Hindi "Sky Kisser" or Hebrew "Scraper of Skies" and especially the Finnish "Cloud Sketcher" for a title. Now write a short piece how you imagine the title to play out.
For added constriction include one or more of these items in your piece: a little girl with a spelling text book, a glow-in-the-dark globe, a purple rabbit's foot, an abacus, a broken ashtray, a collapsed mine shaft.
