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Fiction. © Copyright 2002, Jim Loy
I must warn you that this is a really bad story. It is not so much sad and depressing as poorly written. The story may seem well written at first, but let me assure you that it goes downhill very rapidly. So if you don't like bad stories, don't read any further. Still reading, huh? What an idiot. I suppose you think I was lying? Oh well, it's your funeral.
The Martinson children (Scarlet, Adolf, and baby Gloomy) considered themselves the unluckiest children in the world. Everything went wrong with their lives. They could never win at parchesi, or at flipping coins, or at rock, scissors, paper, as the dice or coins or fingers would always end up the wrong way. They couldn't even win at chess or checkers, as their opponents would always become grandmasters for just one brief moment, and beat the tar out of them. They couldn't even win against each other. Other children would find pennies and dimes on the sidewalks; the Martinson children were the ones who lost pennies and dimes on the sidewalks. You yourself may have benefitted from their bad luck on such occasions.
Then one day Adolf Martinson (the middle child) was reading the newspaper, as he did every day, and saw a headline that offered him hope of a change of fortune: "One Million Dollars First Prize in Unluckiest Children in the World Contest." This was their big chance. If they were, as they believed, the unluckiest children in the world, they would easily win the million dollar first prize. He told his sisters, Scarlet and baby Gloomy about what he had discovered. They were thrilled. "Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz," said baby Gloomy, which meant something like, "Right on, dude."
They found that their main competition in the contest was the Snickety family, three children named Viola, Cello, and Baby Piccolo. Young Adolf Martinson read a dozen or so books about these unhappy children. The books were hard bound, as there didn't seem to be any hope that the books would ever come out in paperback. And he came to realize that his own family was in serious trouble. The other family did not just lose at games, instead death and violent crime followed them wherever they went. "Our only hope," thought Adolf, "is that these books might be fiction." At the big contest, it turned out that the books were not fiction, as the many adults who took an interest in the Snickety family (and a few innocent bystanders besides) were dropping like flies.
The early rounds of the contest involved games of chance. And it became obvious that only three families were truly unlucky, the Martinson family, the Snickety family, and the New York Mets (this was quite a few years ago). Then Scarlet Martinson noticed an evil-looking man hovering around in the background, and shooting poison darts in the direction of the Snickety family. Could this evil-looking man be the cause of all that bad luck? If she were to catch this man and turn him over to the police, would the bad luck dry up? Would the unlucky Snickety family become lucky? Scarlet proceeded (a word which means, well, look it up yourself, for goodness sake) to collect evidence against this man: fingerprints, poison darts, dead bodies, signed confessions, DNA. She turned all of this over to a policeman who told her that it is impolite to interrupt an adult eating a donut.
And so, the Martinson children had the satisfaction of being so unbelievably unlucky that they failed to win a million dollars. I hope you and I are never that unlucky.
Author's comments: The above is a short parody of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. You should probably read those books, as they are good and depressing.