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If she had been stupider, she might have figured out sooner that she was a good luck charm, which sounds counter-intuitive, but is true.

Let me explain to you the nature of good luck charms, which I think works best through example: rabbits' feet are not good luck charms. For one, a good luck charm is always a living thing, so if you have good luck underwear, forget them. You're only deluding yourself.

It takes the full-force, upfront power of a living thing to suck all of the bad luck out of a room, which is ultimately how a good luck charm works. I mean, think of that rabbit. He must have been one poor bastard to get his foot cut off like that.

Bad luck is very scientific, in that way. Something of a Murphy's Law version of the way darkness is the absence of light, good luck is, quite simply, the absence of bad luck. Band luck floats about in every crevasse of the world (and luckily for all of humankind, is very capricious about choosing where to land).



Also lucky for humankind is that good luck charms (or bad luck magnets, as perhaps they would better be called) tend ot be very strong. Think of that poor rabbit, after all--he managed to damn an entire species to getting their legs lopped off. Good luck charms just soak up all the bad luck around; some have been known to disinfect a radius as big as a quarter mile. Unfortunately, charms such as these rarely live long, most often killed by some sort of horrible accident. These are typically too painful to recount, even in such an unfortunate history as this one.

Had I not mentioned the sad ending before this? I apologize for allowing you to get your hopes up.

Anyway, now that all of that nonsense is done with, let us return to our heroine of sorts, a young girl by the name of Alice. Our Alice was clever, certainly, and a more hardworking child would be hard to find. And so her sheer competence saved her from the bad luck that followed her around like a menacing cloud.

For a good luck charm, Alice was relatively successful in the traditional sense, in a way that superseded luck. She studied, for if she ever guessed on a test, she got it wrong. This absurd ration between effort and output was probably good for Alice's character, but was certainly frustrating.

And, of course, there were some aspects in which this approach of leaving nothing, nothing to chance was woefully useless. In work it can work because in work your input work equals your output work--that's simply how things work. But love is another matter entirely. In love, very much is left to chance--one might even say to luck. And so, at twenty-three years old, Alice had never: been in love, not properly, anyhow; asked on a date by a boy; been kissed; been in a relationship; or gotten those warm fuzzies all over at the satisfying knowledge that someone to like likes you back.

That isn't to say there hadn't been some close calls. However, the boys that fancied Alice, who hung around Alice, who spent any time with Alice at all often had something horribly wonderful befall them right before truly trying to pursue the dear, sweet girl. (These horribly wonderful things might be, to name a few, getting the job of his dreams and moving away, or finding a much-sought, long-lost relative halfway around the globe or finding his soulmate and falling blissfully and beautifully in love with a girl named Mel.)

Such was the fate of Alice.

Then, one mysteriously fortunate and wonderfully happy day, Alice met a boy--a boy, of all things. He met her and liked her and asked her for a date and she said yes, bless her unlucky heart. And nothing happened to stop this. It is counter-intuitive again that this happened was what you commonfolk call lucky but would more aptly be called luck-repellent, which works sort of like bug repellent. And since all luck is bad luck, no luck is good luck, so if would be quite correct to call him luckless, but then I'm quite certain someone would get his head all in a tizzy and then lodge a complaint and that right there would be the end of my storytelling. So let's just say this boy was lucky and leave it at that.

Anyway, his lack of luck counteracted her overabundance and so he didn't win any million-dollar prizes and no heavy objects fell on her head and they got to go on their date with some semblance of normalcy.

(The fainthearted may choose to stop reading here, and choose to believe that Alice and her lovely boy lived happily ever after and had a dozen luck-neutral children. If that is the ending you seek, halt now, because when someone lucky comes in contact with a good luck charm, things are bound to get messy indeed.)

The two young lovers chose to go see a movie for their first outing, as have so many young lovers before them. This was quite fine for quite some time, though the other viewers, sitting quietly in the theatre, could feel a strange buzzing sensation in the backs of their heads. This buzzing sensation was coming from a part of the brain sensitive to the current fury of all the bad luck in the area, a part of the brain that fell out of practice in humans around the same time some idiot decided a rabbit's food was lucky, a part of the brain that, in good use, would have been screaming GET OUT NOW. But the viewers instead attributed the sensation to the high-action drama of the film.

This was fine, except for the slight possibility of a little brain damage (but what did that ever hurt anyone?) until the boy grew a little more bold, a little more armorouw. He reached out tentatively and grabbed a hold of Alice's hand.

That day, in a surviving world, angels invented the word Armageddon.