In the beginning, life was grand. Of course, it wasn't grand in the real beginning of the beginning, but more like the beginning a few years further down the road. The beginning had been hell, actually. Harold was thirty-one when he moved out of his parents' house, and that first year was a grueling exercise in ramen tolerance and career perseverance. He submitted veritable cases of index cards of his writing to any publisher in his genre with an address. His genre was greeting cards.

So, in the beginning a few years further down the road, life was grand. Harold would buy his own cards to autograph and send to people he knew. The sympathy cards were quite handy, as people who did not ordinarily speak to him would telephone, vaguely disturbed. His editors were delighted that he was so prolific, especially Ashli-with-an-i, who was grateful he could spell the difficult words she didn't know.

He composed verse regularly, and the checks arrived nearly as regularly. He could soon afford the finer foods and was shopping for luncheon loaf when he met the love of his life. They reached for the same package of liver cheese wrapped in pork fat when their eyes locked. They felt the earth shift on its axis. They saw moonbeams and apple blossoms. They heard mooing from the dairy case speakers. They fell instantly in love.

In the ensuing months, Harold would rise around noon, shuffle toward his laptop in his Freudian slippers, clack out around fifteen kilobytes of love verse to each of the five small-market-share greeting card companies who bought his work, and then crawl back into bed with cold pizza and his beloved. His beloved slept like a torpid lungfish when she took her medication as prescribed, but, when she awoke, she was as sexually uninhibited as the average male claims to desire. Plus, she could touch her knees to her ears.

He penned his most unique love greetings just for her. He would leave them near the toilet so she would find them every afternoon.

    Since first we met, I've found joy in your arms.

    In your smile a hundred lifetimes I have lived.

    You, whose eyes are like rhododendrons

    Beckoning the morning star to blaze in my heart.

    With the patience of high desert stone,

    You lie enchanted by my tales unceasingly.

    With love, only love, my love, we are bound.

She would read them with wide eyes, so overcome as to be speechless. Then she would kiss him with a giggle before spending the evening shopping on the internet.

One day, he awoke to find her gone. Next to the toilet, she had left a note..

    Thanks for the new car. You have been a great host.

    Your Amex is maxed so I've gone back to Cleveland.

    Your tales were no doubt as vile as your vers libre.

    But I would not know, as I'm deaf as a post.

Harold had lost his car, his beloved, his pride, and his credit rating in the one pivotal moment that it took him to look up "vers libre." In their stead was a case of writer's block so corporeal, he named it Martha. He sat around in his bathrobe, conversing dolefully with Martha, eating cheesy puffs, and drinking ennui and gin. He peddled his emergency backlog of material, but not one in fifteen hundred greeting card companies expressed interest. Ashli-with-an-i spoke to his answering machine with obvious concern for his welfare. "Let me know if you have any greetings left in you so I can get on with finding another subcontracting jackass," she said, successfully holding back her tears.

"What is the point of life?" cried Harold. "Is it my lot to suffer eternally? To be debased, humiliated, spat on, urinated on, forced to polish Mistress' boots with my tongue?" He wallowed in self-pity for days until he had to go to the store for more cheesy puffs. When he returned, he wallowed some more. Finally, Martha suggested that he had but one solution.

Yes, a dramatic suicide. A death to symbolize his life's meteoric flight and cratered crash. Death as metaphor rather than the other way round.

Soon thereafter, he climbed to the top of his apartment building, strapped into a voluminous pair of homemade wings. His twenty-seven-page suicide note was duct-taped to his belly, with a copy around his thigh. He screwed his camera to its tripod and marked the ledge where he would be in frame. After setting the timer, he took a deep breath as he felt a slight pull from the core of the earth. The camera beeped. Harold dove.

His wings allowed him a hint of lift, faintly extending the duration of his fall. It was just enough time for his life to spool out before his eyes, but he filled the moment with regret that his trajectory was leading to the roof of a delivery van instead of to the sidewalk.

Slits of light burned like high beams as Harold tried to open his eyes. Two blurred women in white were hunched over sheaves of white paper. Had he made it to the other side? Was there another side? Was this Heaven, and were the angels reading the book of his life? Why couldn't he move?

"Oh, my god, are you on page nineteen yet?" one of the angels giggled.

"Yep," said the other, "right where he says that the world around him has deliquesced into blackness as dark as the rotten soul of an evil cowboy." They laughed so hard that one began to cough, which made the other laugh even harder.

Harold would have wailed, but the tracheostomy tube prevented the air from reaching his vocal cords.