This sentence was composed on the afternoon of October the sixteenth, nineteen seventy‑three, at a small desk on the second floor of one hundred forty‑two Madison Avenue in Toledo, Ohio, with the radiator ticking and the alley window cracked an inch above the sash, by a working copywriter named Mrs. Eunice Brindle, who was waiting for Doreen from the supply room to bring up a fresh typewriter ribbon and decided, in the unbought hour between two tasks, to write one fortune card that would describe itself the whole way through;

and so she set it in pencil first, then in the layout sheet for the Q4 letterpress run, knowing that the fifty thousand copies of card number 04‑39971 would leave the print shop in Sandusky in early December and would be loaded into the brass dispenser slots of the FX‑7 Fortune Edition weighing machines across drug‑store vestibules and bus‑station lobbies and pecan‑roll roadside courtyards through the long middle of the nineteen seventies and on past the price hike from a penny to a nickel and on still further than that;

and that one specific copy of card 04‑39971, the one you are holding, was pressed in the second week of December, nineteen seventy‑three, set aside in a cardboard tray, shipped in the spring of nineteen seventy‑four to a service depot in Marion, Ohio, and waited in stock until route operator Henry Vossberg loaded it, along with two hundred and three of its sisters, into the dispenser of the lobby FX‑7 at the Mansfield Greyhound station on the morning of the nineteenth of August, nineteen seventy‑nine;

and the card sat there in its brass slot for forty‑four hours until, at two‑fourteen on Tuesday morning, the twenty‑first of August, a traveler on the overnight Cleveland‑to‑Indianapolis stepped off the bus, walked across the warm lobby linoleum in the carbon glow of the ceiling fluorescents, dropped a nickel in the FX‑7, watched the dial swing to one hundred forty‑seven (which it would have done regardless), reached down and pulled this card from the slot, did not actually read it, and let it fall to the floor in the same motion as standing up and walking back to the gate;

and the card lay face‑up beside the rubber mat for three minutes and seventeen seconds until you walked into the lobby through the side door, set your duffel down, noticed a small printed rectangle on the linoleum, bent and picked it up, turned it over, and decided, this once, to slow down enough to actually read the thing instead of folding it into a wallet or leaving it where it lay, and your eyes are at this moment moving across the brick‑red letterpress text in the unhurried order Mrs. Brindle imagined six years ago at her desk;

and earlier that morning, before she took the bus down to the office, she had stood at her kitchen sink rinsing two cups in the warm water, looking out the small window over the side yard at the back fence and the line of hedge, thinking about strangers, and the question of writing for someone whose face she would never see, which is the kind of question a working copywriter is permitted to put aside until the kettle boils;

and she carried that thought with her on the long walk past Pulaski Hardware and up the back stairs to the upstairs office where she opened her master notebook to a clean page and wrote, in fountain pen, the note that this one card was for the person who actually read it, signed E. B., and underlined the word actually once, lightly, with the side of the nib;

and the entire long printed sentence you are reading on this cream cardstock, the one Doreen arrived with the ribbon for a few minutes after Mrs. Brindle finished the pencil draft, the one Lloyd Mancuso approved without changing a word because he trusted her, the one that has been waiting in printed form for fourteen years for a reader unhurried enough to take it as the small piece of one‑to‑one printed correspondence it has always been — is concluding at the present moment, in the warm lobby light, between two buses, at the exact second your eye reaches its last word, which is the word now.