The Perilous Existence of Barry Blythe
Barry, a man whose existence was a cosmic experiment in misfortune, once tried to donate blood. Not for altruism, mind you, but because he figured if anything could go wrong, at least it would be contained to a needle. He was, naturally, wrong. The phlebotomist, mid-vein-hunt, sneezed so violently the building's structural integrity was briefly questioned, causing a ceiling tile to detach and land precisely on Barry’s head, leaving everyone else unscathed but Barry with a concussion and a band-aid on his scalp (still no blood donated).
He decided a quiet evening at home was safer. He’d just settled down with his goldfish, Moby Dick XII, when a meteor, described by astronomers as a 'once-in-a-billion-years gravitational anomaly,' decided his roof was the perfect re-entry point. It vaporized Moby Dick XII and left a perfectly circular hole in his ceiling, but not a single other object in the room was disturbed. His neighbour’s prize-winning gnome, however, gained significant notoriety as a meteor-survivor, much to Barry's bitter amusement.
'Right,' Barry muttered to the smoking crater in his living room, 'I'll play their game.' He bought a lottery ticket, certain he would lose. He was right and wrong. He won. A staggering sum. The ticket, however, printed on what turned out to be experimental, spontaneously combustible paper, burst into a cheerful, self-immolating flame the moment he tried to check the numbers, leaving nothing but a faint, acrid smell of winning.
His final attempt at normalcy was a stroll through 'Lucky Meadows Park,' a place named by a municipal committee with an evidently sadistic sense of humor. Barry, admiring a particularly resilient dandelion, somehow triggered a flock of migratory geese to perform an aerial bombardment directly above him. He slipped on a particularly pungent deposit, tumbling headfirst into a previously unmapped, surprisingly deep quicksand pit. As he slowly, inevitably, began to sink, a nearby sign—decayed, neglected, and perfectly balanced on its last hinge—fell with a gentle *thunk*, landing squarely on his head. The sign, now obscuring his view of the rapidly disappearing sky, read, in fading, optimistic letters: 'Enjoy Your Stay!'