The Collateral Damage of Doing Nothing

Bartholomew "Barty" Bumble had seen it all: dropped lotto tickets into active volcanoes, been struck by lightning twice on a sunny day, and once, during a quiet walk, had a grand piano fall on him (it wasn't from a great height, just enough to pin him for an hour). So, on Tuesday, Barty decided to outsmart fate. His grand plan? To do absolutely nothing. To spend the entire day in bed. What could possibly go wrong?

He nestled deep into his mattress, a triumphant smirk playing on his lips. Five minutes later, the antique bed frame, which had been perfectly fine for thirty years, spontaneously disintegrated. Barty plummeted through the floorboards, landing with a soft, bewildered thud directly into his eccentric neighbor, Mrs. Periwinkle’s, taxidermy-laden basement. Mrs. Periwinkle, a kindly woman with an unsettling collection of perpetually startled animals, was in the middle of articulating a particularly grumpy badger.

"Oh, dear," she chirped, looking up from her gruesome work. "A live model? How… unexpected."

Barty, tangled in bedsheets and smelling faintly of mothballs and formaldehyde, scrambled to his feet. In his haste, he tripped over a display of snarling stoats, which cascaded onto a shelf of antique firearms Mrs. Periwinkle inexplicably kept down there. One ancient blunderbuss, startled by the commotion, discharged with a mighty roar, missing Barty by inches but blowing a rather significant hole in the main support beam.

The house, a rickety Victorian double-dwelling, groaned. Plaster dust rained down like a grim snowfall. Barty, now convinced that even thermodynamics conspired against him, scrambled for the exit as the structure began its slow, majestic collapse. He burst out into the morning light, gasping, only to find himself face-to-face with a team of bewildered demolition workers.

"Well, that was efficient," one remarked, gesturing at Barty’s rapidly disintegrating home. "Thought we had till lunch."

Barty stood amidst the rubble, utterly homeless, covered in plaster, badger fur, and the lingering scent of eternity. A single, perfectly preserved, artisanal gherkin jar rolled to a stop at his feet. "At least," he mumbled, wiping a tear of frustration and dust from his eye, "I didn't stub my toe today."

Just then, a pigeon, startled by the nearby crash of his last remaining wall, dropped its morning offering precisely and emphatically onto Barty’s head.