The Exigencies of Fate

A very short, very silly story

He was the acme of intelligence, the zenith of nobility, the very mole on the visage of beauty, and were all the gods of old and all the paragons of virtue, skill, and beauty that had been depicted in the highest art of all the ages been combed through to find one equal to him, well, let’s just say one would be searching for a very, very, very long time. Sadly, this young man’s life was marred by misfortune. You see, due to a sudden conjunction of Mars with the thirty-eighth degree of Mercury in the twelfth house when Jupiter was in retrograde and all the stars were spinning backwards, getting dizzy with themselves, and the universe was having a sudden existential crisis over the prospect of eternity, he was doomed to be unlucky in love. 

His first love was a very beautiful woman, glancing-eyed, delicate-footed, moisturized-armed, cute-as-a-buttonhole, but alas, she acquired the hots for his best friend, and married him. His second love was, we have to admit, a little worse for wear, but passably charming in her own way—and indeed, there is something to be said for those specimens who, in comparison to the more flashy beauties, the hothouse flowers, the dazzlers of this world, at first appear plain, but on closer inspection are revealed to have delights, delectable, if not divine, delicacies of their own. For what would the sun be without the shade? And who does not sometimes prefer a good Billboard Hot 100 to the purest coloratura? So he took this woman to wife. But it happened one day that as they were driving home from a pleasant jaunt in the countryside, their car got stuck in a muddy ditch, and by no means could they push it out. They tried and tried but to no avail. Then a lad came whistling down the road, evidently from one of the local villages, and with one mighty push of his muscular forearm, he promptly in one and the same moment rescued the car and stole the wife’s heart. 

So it was back to square one. But now he was jaded, and he cursed all womankind, all mankind, all humankind, and, looking up into the heavens above, all the celestial bodies who had ever been so impudent as to think they could decide fates and seal destinies, simply because they were up there and the rest were down here. What arrogance! What blind conceit! As he was shaking his fist at the sky, a comet decided it would be good for target practice and barreled into it, thus killing the man in one swift blow. THE END.