The Unbearable Lightness of Being Unlucky

Bartholomew "Barty" Bumble was a man for whom Murphy's Law wasn't a principle, but a personal vendetta from the universe. His birth certificate was printed on toilet paper, which then jammed the hospital's shredder. His first steps led him directly into an open manhole cover. He'd tried to embrace it, once. "Embrace the chaos!" he'd declared, right before a flock of migrating geese mistook his new white suit for a very unfortunate public restroom.

One particularly Tuesday, Barty decided to buy a lottery ticket, purely out of morbid curiosity. To his utter astonishment, he won. The grand prize. Before he could claim it, however, a rare, highly aggressive breed of paper-eating moth, previously thought extinct, materialized from thin air, devoured his ticket, and then spontaneously combusted into a shower of glitter that gave Barty a mild but persistent rash.

He tried therapy. His therapist's office building was condemned mid-session due to a previously undiscovered sinkhole forming precisely beneath Barty's chair. He tried to find solace in nature; a serene walk in the park ended with him being mistaken for a tree by a particularly confused beaver, resulting in significant dental work on Barty's shin.

"There's gotta be an upside," Barty mumbled, as he lay in a hospital bed, the beaver incident still throbbing. A nurse entered. "Good news, Mr. Bumble! You're miraculously immune to almost all known diseases!" Barty blinked. "So, I'm practically immortal?" The nurse beamed. "In a way! But don't worry, your life insurance policy just expired due to an administrative error, and your hospital bill is... well, let's just say it could buy a small island nation."

Just then, a rogue meteor, no bigger than a golf ball, sailed through the open window, ricocheted off a perfectly aligned bedpan, and landed squarely in Barty's bowl of hospital jelly. The jelly, somehow, instantly transformed into a tiny, perfectly sculpted replica of his therapist's condemned building, complete with a miniature sinkhole. Barty sighed, picked up a spoon. "At least," he said, eyeing the miniature destruction, "it's strawberry."

A flock of pigeons then flew in, snatched the jelly-building, and carried it off into the sunset, leaving behind a single, mocking feather.