The bar I frequent has a nice selection of greeting cards but I didn’t see one that nailed the sentiment. I thought maybe I could go for a blank one and just compose something myself inside but even the photos quashed all inspiration, with the hat-wearing babies and the smoking old ladies and the fat guys on unicycles. So I was forced to handmake one with available materials. Luckily the family that lives in the station wagon parked near my office has a kindergartner and I sort of tripped and fell against him as he was walking “home” and knocked him over and took his little Miffy-branded backpack and inside was some construction paper and dull-edged scissors and Elmer’s and a well-worn security blanket made out of a beer-stained flannel shirt. I ran away and hid in the woods and got down to business. A divine hand guided me, it seemed. Never in a kagillion* years would I have come up with that design if it hadn’t been for the gross interference of God — bold swathes of color, dodecahedral mosaics, serpentine 3-D spirals, the smell of cinnamon and soil. I wrote the inner message in glue, then sprinkled ground-up leaves and twigs on it to give it a nice organic quality, “Sorry your wife died while giving birth to my daughter,” and then a frowny face. But I chickened out at the last minute and signed my brother’s name. My life is way too crazy to deal with this shit right now.

*If you do a search on Google for kagillion it says: “Did you mean kajillion?”