I found them standing in the woodshed, silent and with their heads down. They seemed disoriented as if looking for something that wasn’t there. From their demeanour I understood that they were time travellers and from their appearance it seemed that they had come from a recent past.

It was a small group, dressed in corduroy pants and flannel shirts. They stayed silent but somehow, I knew that they had constructed their time machine out of timber using simple tools; the kind of thing that you find in a dim shed covered in dust and spiderwebs. 

Perhaps in the excitement of the departure they forgot to bring the machine with them, maybe it was too heavy, or just an old thing discarded like old people are left behind.

Now they were lost in the future, frozen in an unfamiliar present, yearning to go back to the past where they had been discarded as old folk.