The typeface, a narrow bold block print that unmistakably dated it in the same way that the Times New Roman typeface would one day date Leora’s magazine, trapped a sadness between its serifs, the same sadness trapped in the sickly yellow-green of photographs and films from thirty years ago. The diamond-shaped decorations on the tall letters jutted out like bony knees, misplaced hips on an old man who hobbles along with swooping uneven steps, too gnarled to run. Of course, it wasn’t so much the typeface as the words that sank into a hollow space in her gut. ATTENTION, ATTENTION!!!! they screamed. Caught between the double T’s languished a time when saying “Attention!” was enough to get someone’s attention.

She turned the yellowed pamphlet’s page, its corners crumbling in her hand like the city’s dissolving cornerstones. The pamphlet described, in painful detail, how the weight of newly built “skyscrapers” of seven stories or more was crushing the island of Manhattan at an alarming rate. Various scientists estimated that in less than three years, New York City would be lost beneath the sea. All residents were advised to sell their property—the pamphlet didn’t mention who the hapless buyers might be—and flee to New Jersey before it was too late. As she scanned the text, Leora remembered learning at some point about this particular nineteenth-century hoax. People had believed it, and those who could afford it had hurried to New Jersey, leaving the wretched refuse of the city’s teeming shores to sink into the sea. The tempest-tossed, however, too poor to think of leaving, saved their flight to New Jersey for later generations, when their descendants abandoned the city’s dark streets for even darker ones, darkened by trees instead of charlatans and thieves. As she slid the pamphlet back onto its shelf, though, she saw something that caught her own attention on the shelf just alongside it: a painted tin dollhouse.