Arthur's Particularly Perilous Polka-Dot Tuesday
Arthur wasn't a glass-half-empty kind of guy; he was a glass-just-shattered-and-cut-his-foot kind of guy. His alarm clock, a notoriously reliable device, chose this Tuesday morning to play the opening bars of a polka, then spontaneously combusted. "Just another Tuesday," he sighed, patting out the small blaze on his nightstand with his slipper.
His toast, without fail, landed butter-side down on the kitchen floor, which, unbeknownst to him, had developed a small, but incredibly aggressive, oil slick overnight. He slipped, doing a full acrobatic spin, only to land head-first in a bucket of stale mop water he hadn't known was there. "Well, at least I'm clean," he mumbled, pulling himself up, only to realize the bucket had contained not water, but a particularly potent industrial floor stripper. His hair was gone. Completely. Not just wet, but chemically removed.
He decided a walk might clear his head, or what was left of it. Stepping outside, a flock of pigeons, clearly operating under some malevolent avian directive, dive-bombed him with the precision of a squadron of WWII fighter planes, leaving him looking like a modern art piece titled 'Guano Abstract.'
Just as he was about to give up and crawl back into bed, a meteor, no larger than a pea, but travelling at an astonishing velocity, entered Earth's atmosphere and, with surgical precision, embedded itself directly into his left nostril. He sneezed. The meteor shot out, ricocheted off a nearby lamppost, and perfectly deflated all four tires on his car.
Defensively, Arthur declared to the uncaring universe, pulling the now-cold, butter-down toast from his pocket, "You know what? It could be worse." At that precise moment, a shimmering, marmot-sized portal tore open directly beneath his feet. He tumbled in. A single, very annoyed-looking marmot poked its head out, sniffed, then pulled in a rather singed, polka-dotted sock before the portal snapped shut. Arthur was never seen again. Though, reports of a new, inexplicably intelligent marmot colony with a penchant for complaining about burnt toast did surface.