Bart Crumple's Black Hole of Bad Luck

Bart Crumple woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Literally. His bed frame chose that precise moment to collapse, depositing him onto a discarded banana peel from yesterday’s ill-fated breakfast. This, as always, was just the overture.

He managed to get dressed, though his last clean sock mysteriously vanished, only to reappear later fused to the inside of his microwave. A quick attempt at toast resulted in its spontaneous combustion, triggering the smoke detector which, in turn, triggered the sprinklers. Bart, now drenched, slipped on the soggy banana peel (still there, a loyal harbinger of doom) and hit his head on a particularly sharp-edged copy of 'The Little Book of Positive Affirmations.'

Deciding to walk to work was, in hindsight, his gravest error. He was promptly dive-bombed by a flock of pigeons, each seemingly intent on demonstrating their mastery of avian target practice. A sudden gust of wind stole his umbrella, which then, with improbable precision, impaled itself into the only open window of a passing ice cream truck, causing a catastrophic cascade of sprinkles, soft-serve, and existential despair for the driver.

By the time he reached the office, looking like a drowned, pigeon-bombed scarecrow, his boss called him in. 'Bart,' she began, 'I’m afraid we have to let you go. Your presence… well, it seems to correlate with a disproportionate number of workplace incidents. Just this morning, the server room spontaneously caught fire when you walked past it.'

Bart sighed, a deep, world-weary sigh. As he walked out, a meteorite, no bigger than a golf ball, sailed through the open office window and landed with a *plink* directly into his empty coffee mug, which was sitting on his now-vacant desk. It wasn’t the impact that bothered him; it was the fact that he'd just missed discovering the most valuable space rock in human history, probably. And then, as he stepped outside, he realized he’d forgotten his keys. And it started to rain, only on him.