Today the million-year-old man is celebrating his last birthday. His wife of two thousand years has prepared him a carrot cake with just a hundred candle. They are not rich. Carrots are good for the memory.

The wife has porcelain skin with a few hairline cracks. The man is handsome like an oak in the fall, when the leaves are already yellow, but they are still there. His eyes are faded from emerald to glass.

Jessica Lee, the reporter for “The Daily Village,” snaps pictures. She already has the title of the article in mind:”Eternal Love in Bloom.” When she bends over, the man sees her black panties and grins.

While the wife lights the candles, her Chinese-made gown catches on fire. By the time the million-year-old man brings the extinguisher, she burns to ashes. It’s enough to crash the party, but to make matters worse, the man and his wife have a prenuptial that calls for them to die on the same day.

The man goes to his lawyer who examines the prenuptial and says, “Rejoice!” Normally, he would have said, “The said contract has a convenient loophole.” But he says, “Rejoice!” with a hard exclamation point in the end for the sake of the million-year-old man. He suspects that his client might be old-fashioned.

“This prenuptial can not be enforced in the State of New York,” the lawyer says. “Have a cigar on me. It’s your birthday after all.”

The man goes home, sweeps his wife’s ashes in a plastic ice cream jar, and rents a soft porn movie. He reclines in his chair. He grins like the Cheshire cat. He finishes another slice of the cake.

He has never had a cigar before. So he lights it. A spark falls on his lap. His Chinese-made suit catches on fire, and he burns to ashes, while a big female butt is filling the TV screen and a seductive voice is crooning: “Yes, Baby, yes.”

Jessica Lee is told about the second death. She decides to change the title of the article. She wants it to be: “The End Comes Simultaneously.”

Since she is tied up to the bed post, blindfolded by her black panties, and since her boyfriend of three months works between her legs, and since she is forced to use the speech recognition program in her laptop, the title comes up as “Yes, Baby, yes!’

She doesn’t want to correct it. Because sex sells better than eternal love. Someone more cynical than the million-year-old man could mistake that line for a metaphor.

Read more about Mark here.

Read more about Fernanda here.