The Perpetual Plight of Bartholomew Butterfield

Bartholomew "Barty" Butterfield was not born under a bad sign; he was born *as* a bad sign. His mother often recounted how the delivering doctor tripped over a rogue antechamber rug, sending Barty somersaulting into a conveniently placed, but highly unsterile, laundry hamper. A harbinger, she'd say, of things to come.

Barty's life was a meticulously curated exhibition of near misses and spectacular failures. He once bought a lottery ticket – the *winning* one – only for a particularly aggressive seagull to snatch it mid-air, mistaking the paper for a particularly valuable piece of nesting material. The bird, naturally, was then struck by a passing unicycle enthusiast, scattering the precious fragments across a storm drain.

Seeking a more grounded hobby, Barty enrolled in a pottery class. His very first attempt at a decorative vase spontaneously combusted, not only obliterating the kiln but also launching a ceramic shard with pinpoint accuracy directly into his left eye. "At least it wasn't my *good* eye," he'd quipped to the paramedics, ever the optimist, ignoring the fact that *both* were now patched.

Desperate for human connection, he tried online dating. He met Eleanor, a woman whose bio declared a shared passion for "rare coin collecting and competitive birdwatching." Their first date, a charming bistro, was interrupted by a full-scale federal sting operation. Eleanor, it turned out, was a deep-cover agent, and Barty, whose unlucky habit of fidgeting with a loose button on his jacket looked suspiciously like a dead drop, was promptly cuffed, interrogated, and released only after explaining, in excruciating detail, his pottery-related eye injury.

Finally, Barty decided to embrace solitude. "No external forces, no internal combustion," he declared, settling onto his sofa with a cup of lukewarm tea and the remote. A blissful silence descended. Then, a faint whistling sound from outside grew rapidly louder. A small meteorite, no larger than a particularly robust potato, hurtled through his roof, landed *precisely* on his remote control, and changed the channel to an infomercial for "Turn Your Luck Around: A 7-Day Program for Perpetual Positivity!"

Barty sighed, the lukewarm tea growing colder. At least the meteorite had missed the tea. For now.