So there I was, whiling away an uneventful Tuesday afternoon in 1895, when a pair of spectacles caught my gaze. The owner, a young newspaper editor with wild ideas, was chain smoking his luck away in the back of an alley.
“Would you believe,” he croaked, exhaling plumes that momentarily braided the dusty air, “these things were once so rare, they were practically gold?”
It turns out, “conversational and casual” was a timeless mode, though the anachronistic riffs of modern slang bemused him. I mused that if we could only flip the headlines a few epochs ahead.
Little did he know his words would echo through the halls of missed opportunities or encapsulate odysseys etched into faded parchment.