We were standing by the fence with our drinks when our neighbor came up to us. We didn’t see him until he loomed up in the blue light of the bug-catcher. “The Lost Generation,” he croaked, splitting the lazy air, the floating ink-blot sky, the damp squares of municipal garden plots. We rattled our ice. Earlier, and from a distance, he’d disturbed us with his high humped back, his shuffling step, the darkness of his house. Now we could see the loose lens hanging down on his cheek. Its spectral glint. “The Lost Generation was the first generation,” he said.

This story of technology through the generations appears in the 20th anniversary issue of Sleepingfish magazine, which you can purchase here.