He smoothed it onto his envelope. Over the past two weeks, as he had come to terms with the discovery of his own demise, Gordon had penned and stamped three submissions to literary magazines — two stories and a selection of five poems — all about his relationship with Chloe Gold. He felt a strange sense of freedom. Gordon Small had gone beyond the grave, and anything he wrote now, regardless of its invective, no one could hold against him. He had located the postage machine in Manos’s cubicle one night recently and printed off a stack of tickets to ride. He considered each submission a test. Not of his own abilities, but of their ability to travel outside of Heaven. He tapped the current envelope against his lips in a silent goodbye-and-good-luck. Gordon’s nights now heaved with punctuation, but not the mere additives of commas and colons that he salt-sprinkled into the pulp as it passed by him during the day. If one were to label the cubicles like booths in a restaurant, Gordon’s would be the one hundred and thirty-third, the very last fuzzy pink booth.
