The Immaculate Demise of Arthur Pumble
Arthur Pumble was, by all accounts, a man dedicated to not dying. Not just avoiding *unpleasant* deaths, mind you, but *any* death. Especially the cliché ones. A heart attack? Too common. A car crash? Positively pedestrian. Slipping on a banana peel? He’d rather spontaneously combust, which, ironically, he also meticulously guarded against.
His life was a meticulously constructed fortress against fate. He wore a hazmat suit to the grocery store (before it was fashionable), had his house sanitized daily by a team of surgeons in cleanroom gear, and only consumed nutrients grown hydroponically in a sealed biosphere he personally supervised. Forget germ theory; Arthur believed in *everything* theory. From rogue toasters to asteroid impacts, if it could kill, Arthur had a protocol, a counter-measure, and a backup counter-measure's backup.
His masterpiece, however, was his bunker. A hermetically sealed, triple-locked, anti-gravity-cushioned, allergen-free, radiation-shielded, self-cleaning, organic-hemp-insulated marvel of paranoia. Here, Arthur thought, he had finally outsmarted mortality. He was safe from all the slings and arrows, the cosmic jokes, the cruel twists of fate.
One Tuesday afternoon, while admiring the sterile perfection of his existence, a microscopic speck appeared in his peripheral vision. A rare, uncatalogued species of dust mite, genetically mutated by the sheer lack of *anything* else to eat in Arthur's hyper-clean environment, had developed both sentience and a profound sense of mischief. It had, through sheer force of will (and a tiny, repurposed speck of Arthur's shed skin), constructed a minuscule catapult. With precision honed over generations of microscopic evolutionary boredom, it launched a single, organic, locally-sourced, artisanally-fermented mold spore directly into Arthur’s only exposed nostril.
Arthur Pumble, who was, unbeknownst to him, severely allergic to irony (which is, by itself, quite ironic), instantly keeled over. Cause of death, as noted by the baffled automated medic system: "Acute Anaphylactic Response to Existential Absurdity, complicated by a rogue dust mite with excellent aim."
The news reports, unable to grasp the sublime poetic justice, simply noted it as "Death by Unfathomable Coincidence." His will, which stipulated that his funeral be held in a vacuum chamber to avoid posthumous contamination, was instead conducted in a surprisingly dusty old chapel. The vacuum chamber, it turned out, was fully booked for an international cat show. Some ironies, Arthur would have begrudgingly acknowledged, were simply unavoidable.