and her father had been brandishing a shotgun.
Ron guessed that was probably the end of it.
He sighed and reached for his soda, not realizing until too late that he’d dipped his sleeve in his barbecue beans, at which point this distracted him sufficiently that he knocked his drink over. Not all of it dripped through the hole in the table on to his trousers, but most did.
It was this kind of thing that caused many people, behind his back, to call him Bad Luck Ron.
As Ron was tucking into a slice of pecan pie and wondering why it tasted so strongly of fish, he looked up to see a man standing at the end of the table.
The man was old, with white hair pushed back from his forehead and large hands. He was wearing a crumpled black linen suit. He didn’t say anything. He merely stood there, apparently watching the corner of the booth, the seat next to Ron.
He was looking at it so fixedly, in fact, that Ron turned to look too. The seat was empty, as he’d known it would be.
Well … it appeared empty. Ron couldn’t see the strange, four-foot-high fungus-like creature sitting there, or the expression of utter surprise, tinged with guilt and nervousness, upon its gnarled beige face.
Ron turned back to the old man. ‘Uh, can I help you?’
The man walked away.
Ron watched him head across the diner and out of the door without looking back. ‘Huh,’ he said.
He soldiered on with his pie a little longer, but eventually gave up. It was making him feel nauseous.
After he’d paid his bill, electing as always not to mention any problem with the food, Ron left the diner and stepped out into the freezing parking lot. He was disappointed to see snow was falling again. Driving home would have taken him five minutes. On foot, it would be half an hour up an icy hill. Oh well. Nothing he could do about it.
When he was halfway across the lot a figure stepped out from behind a car. This sufficiently startled Ron that he slipped on a patch of ice and fell down.
From his prone position he realized it was the old man he’d seen in the diner. Dots of snow swirled around the man’s head. Ron thought it must be snow, anyway.
‘Please stand up,’ the man said.
Ron tried, but halfway through the attempt his foot hit the same patch of ice and he fell down again in approximately the same way.
The old man waited patiently.
On the third attempt Ron managed to get to his feet. ‘Who are you?’
‘That’s not a question you need the answer to,’ the man said. ‘Would you turn away from me, please? Carefully, so you don’t fall down again.’
‘Why?’
‘Just do it.’
Ron did as he was told. Something about the old man’s manner told Ron that doing what he said would be the wisest course of action.
‘Thank you. Now hold still.’
There was a pause; then Ron felt a pulling sensation, as if something was tugging at his back. He glanced behind and saw the old man remained several feet behind, so it couldn’t be him.
‘Face the front.’
Ron quickly turned back. The tugging sensation continued for a few moments, getting stronger, as if something had its claws in his clothes, or even skin, and was refusing or unable to let go – and then suddenly stopped.
He heard the old man mutter something, followed by footsteps crunching away in the fallen snow.
‘You may turn back towards me now.’
Ron did so, slowly, surprised to find the old man was still there, now looking at him with a thoughtful expression, his head cocked on one side.
‘I can tell that you should not have received the attentions of my associate,’ he said. ‘I shall chastise him for it.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I will give you one piece of advice, in recompense for your troubles. Even when you think you’ve apologized as much as you can, once more never harms. Your story can change. Overnight.’
Ron watched the man walk away across the parking lot to a large black car in the corner. Despite his age, he seemed to have no difficulty navigating the patches of ice that had proved unavoidably treacherous to Ron.
Oddly, the old man opened the back door of his car first. He stood with it open, waiting for a moment, as if for a tardy dog, and then closed it, got into the front and drove away.
Halfway home and already very cold, Ron had an idea. It didn’t seem like an especially good idea, but he couldn’t get it out of his head. He stopped, turned round, and trudged towards downtown instead.
He went to the Burger King, where Rionda ignored him steadfastly for an hour and a half. Eventually, however, she consented to listen as he said sorry for everything, up to and most definitely including the debacle the previous weekend at her parents’ house.
Her parents’ bathroom remained a sore point for Rionda, as the army had visited that afternoon and there was growing speculation that it – and the rest of the house, and possibly the ones on either side – might have to be destroyed in the interests of public safety, but Ron was so patently sincere that she couldn’t help but soften.
He seemed different somehow, too, and when he walked her home at the end of her shift it was Rionda, rather than Ron, who slipped on ice going up the hill leading to her own little house. Ron caught her arm, and she did not fall.
She kissed him.
Five months later they were married.
They will play no further part in our story, but I’m happy to relate that they lived happily ever after.
At around the time Ron arrived downtown, cold and snow-covered, and was plucking up the courage to go into Burger King, the old man in the black linen suit was sitting at the counter in a dark and dangerous basement bar only five streets away. To the casual observer it would have looked as if he was alone. He was not.
The imp called Vaneclaw was perched on the next seat. Bar stools are not designed for the likes of accident imps, and he kept slipping off. If you’d been able to see him, you might have thought the thing he most resembled was an extremely large mushroom, one of those exotic types, possibly a chanterelle. With a face, though, and spindly little arms and legs, covered in patches of hairy mould, like something you might find lurking at the back of the fridge after several months, and hurriedly throw away. Luckily – in common with all familiars of his class – Vaneclaw was invisible to the normal eye.
‘You are a very stupid imp,’ the old man said.
‘Oh, I know.’
The imp did know this. Not only was he stupid on his own account, he came from an unusually stupid family, a line of imps celebrated for greater than usual dimness. His parents had once gone four years without contact, though they were plaguing two people in the same house, because they were too stupid to find their way from one floor to the next. This might have been more excusable had it not been a single-storey dwelling. Vaneclaw’s grandmother was worse, so very dense that not only could she not even remember her own name (consistently referring to herself as ‘that one, right here, where I am’) but she also spent nearly thirty years plaguing herself. (In her defence, after she’d started, it was difficult to stop. Accident imps are sticky. Once they’ve bonded to someone they’re almost impossible to get off.) The entire family was so intellectually torpid that they didn’t even have the sense to apply to be stupidity imps instead, whose