By Golly!

A birthday soirée, giddy with paper horns and Charleston sweat, spirals into carnival when Fanny bestows upon Charles a pocket-watch—its tick an embryonic heartbeat for the evening’s chaos. The orator, half-inebriated on his own cadence, fumbles the gleaming disc; it arcs like a comet and plunks into a brass spittoon, swallowed by amber broth while the band plays on. Laughter detonates, petticoats whirl, and the room fractures into two gendered universes: the wives retreat to powder noses, the husbands stampede toward a stag den thick with cigar fog and jazz. There, a nimble-fingered waiter, eyes as slick as patent leather, lifts the recovered timepiece from Charles’s waistcoat in a sleight so elegant it feels choreographed. Morning finds Charles stammering excuses to a skeptical Fanny, his words as bent as train rails. Just as marital doom crystallizes, the thief is collared in the street—watch flung skyward, caught by sunlight, restored to its rightful pulse. The final shot freezes on a kiss that tastes of dawn and leftover champagne, the city’s clang already erasing last night’s myth.