Barty Butterfield's Black Friday the Thirteenth

Barty Butterfield, a man whose life was a persistent rumour of calamity, woke with a full-body clench on Friday the 13th. His morning toast had a habit of landing butter-side down on his *clean* shirt, and he once won a raffle for a free root canal. Today, however, he vowed to outsmart the universe.

He meticulously planned his escape route from cosmic malice. He side-stepped a loose rug (potential trip hazard), opened his curtains with his left hand (right-hand was feeling 'ominous'), and even used a specific, 'lucky' spoon for his cereal, which promptly bent in half. Minor setback.

Navigating the urban jungle was a tactical masterpiece. He crossed the street twice to avoid a ladder, walked three blocks out of his way to bypass a construction site teeming with black cats and a spilled salt shaker, and wore noise-cancelling headphones to preemptively silence any ill-omened bird cries. He felt like a ninja of anti-superstition, smugly sidestepping every shadow of misfortune.

Approaching his office building, he saw it: a four-leaf clover, nestled innocently by a lamppost. "Aha!" Barty thought, "The universe surrenders!" He bent down, a triumphant smirk already forming. But then, right beside the clover, lay a penny. Tails-up.

Barty's eyes narrowed. "Never pick up a tails-up penny," his grandmother, a woman whose own luck was so bad she once bought a 'lucky' lottery ticket that spontaneously combusted, had warned him. A quick flip, however, would turn it into good fortune. A clever move. A smart move.

As he knelt, carefully extending a finger to flick the coin, a series of events unfolded with the orchestral precision of a Rube Goldberg machine designed by a malevolent deity. He bumped his head on a low-hanging sign for "Lucky Lager," which, dislodged by the impact, promptly fell and brained him lightly. The thud startled a flock of pigeons overhead. One, a particularly portly specimen, released its morning's bounty directly into Barty's open, gasping mouth.

The pigeon's offering, it turned out, contained a super-rare, super-aggressive strain of avian flu, condemning Barty to a three-week hospital stay. During his absence, his apartment building was declared structurally unsound and condemned (he missed the eviction notice). His prize-winning pet goldfish, 'Finny,' tragically passed away after the neighbour tasked with feeding it mistook fish food for artisanal sourdough starter. And the penny? A street sweeper, minutes later, scooped it up, flipped it to heads out of habit, and casually pocketed what turned out to be a rare 1943 copper cent worth tens of thousands.

Barty, recovering but now also homeless and fish-less, stared blankly at his hospital ceiling. He had merely tried to avoid a minor jinx. Instead, he had orchestrated a symphony of cosmic misfortune. The universe hadn't just played a joke on him; it had rewritten the entire script, cast him as the patsy, and then forgot to tell him where the cameras were.