0. Self-portrait.

He stood by the window. Rain fell.

He removed his forehead from the back of his hand and allowed his eyes to focus on the wet glass. Had it really been so long since he'd written anything? Though his internal narrative had not lost its grandiloquence in fabricating the usual sequences of self-aggrandizement and self-beration, he'd committed nothing to paper.

"Fuckles," he uttered. The word was to be his last.

On the floor below, in three adjacent apartments, circumstances convened such that the following events occurred almost simultaneously with the author's minced oath. Konstantin Philalopolous was making an unauthorized renovation to his bedroom wall in an effort to accommodate the Murphy bed he'd purchased after his live-in girlfriend saw one in a rerun of an old sitcom and caught on to the fad thirty years late. Two doors down, Jeffrey "Meatsteak" Flynn and Doyle "Sack-Dog" Saks, football enthusiasts and latent homosexuals with a combined body-mass index testifying to the unbalanced spectator/participant ratio of their involvement with sporting events, were vicariously celebrating the success of their team in a meaningless preseason game by re-enacting a recent tackle with enough physical force to mask the sensuality of the experience. Both side walls of the olfactorily-disabled Mrs. Ethyl Dorplaster's lonesome apartment crashed in simultaneously, ventilating the space that had previously lacked a favourable oxygen-to-gas ratio just as the widow was attempting to re-light the pilot on her stove and wondering why the match wouldn't strike.