Charcoal is the color of the hour just after the streetlamps decide to come on, and these corduroy pants carry it in every ridge, a plowed field of dusk running from waist to ankle. They are skinny and cut close, with enough stretch in the cotton blend to follow a stride without argument, and the tags still hang from them like a label on a trunk that never left the station.
Never worn, they keep the rare, slightly sad innocence of things bought in hope and then forgotten by the calendar. Take them out into an autumn evening, and let the ridges catch the last of the light while you pretend, as everyone does, that you never guessed how well they would look.
