However, when she arranged her interview at Random Accessories, she was relieved to learn that it was owned and operated by a man named Rick Random. Mr. Random was finishing up an interview with someone else when Leora arrived at his shop, so she started to look around the store—taking notes, technically, but mainly just killing time. After a few minutes, though, she was engrossed, or, to speak the language of skulls and jaws, swallowed whole.

Mr. Random had assembled a fascinating collection of items that were once remarkably useful, to the point where a person from a hundred years ago might have walked into Random Accessories to find something like the opposite of Costco—a store selling many of life’s necessities, but in small quantities and at astronomically high prices. A washboard, priced at $150, waited for takers. Butter churns crowded one corner. In another, sewing machines—which the U.S. Department of Commerce, Leora had mentioned in a recent article, had now reclassified from “apparel” to “recreation”—stood in silence, wondering if anyone would ever again press down on their creaky treadles and breathe them back to life.

What was most engrossing at first were the bones, which also, she supposed, fit into the category of things that once were useful. It seemed that it was scarcely unusual for strangers to deliver unmarked skeleton parts to Mr. Random’s door, since a large percentage of his inventory appeared to be made up of bones. Human bones, animal bones, bones that looked like they could scarcely be from anything but giant animals long extinct. Sharp-toothed skulls of cats, assembled together with rib cages large enough to accommodate a trapped rat.

But mostly there were skulls of people, sitting in long rows like a nightmarish display from the Cambodian killing fields, grinning from earhole to earhole. As Leora stood there staring at the rows of human skulls, she began to notice that she wasn’t watching them as much as they were watching her. The grins disturbed her most of all. How strange, she thought, that one needs to be alive in order to frown. She turned away from their eyeholes and came across a shelf with a yellowed paper pamphlet.

ATTENTION, ATTENTION!!!!
NEW YORK IS SINKING INTO THE ATLANTIC!