The coffee spill should have been a one-off.
That's what Samuel told himself on Monday morning as he stood in the kitchen, buttering toast and waiting for his kettle to whistle. Accidents happened. He was clumsy sometimes. No point overthinking it.
Still, he caught himself glancing at the damaged manuscript on the corner of his desk as he passed by, the wrinkled pages looking like they'd been fished out of a swamp. The brown tide mark ran right over the most important page of his draft.
He sighed. "Lord, I really needed that page…"
That week, Samuel threw himself back into The Ashen Rider. He'd been circling a pivotal scene for days one where the marshal cornered a stranger in the saloon, trying to draw a dangerous name out of him without tipping his hand. The scene was meant to be slow, tense. Cigarette smoke in the air. Glasses clinking at the poker table. A revolver hidden under the table.
On Wednesday, just as Samuel was deep into the conversation between the marshal and the stranger, the power went out.
Not just a flicker - full black. His computer went silent. The fan died. The faint hum of the refrigerator vanished.
He sat there in the sudden quiet, staring at the screen. He'd been about to hit save.
"No… no, no, no…"
He jabbed the power button, but nothing. From outside came the sound of neighbors calling to each other, and someone shouting about the outage.
He made himself a sandwich and waited. Two hours later, the lights came back on, and Samuel rushed to open his document only to find his last save was from the night before. An entire morning of work was gone.
"Lord," he said aloud, rubbing his forehead, "what's with my luck this week?"
By Friday, he had rewritten the scene, and it was stronger than before. But the interruptions kept coming.
Saturday morning, he was just getting to the part where the marshal's thumb eased the hammer of his revolver back, when his pen dried out. He reached for another, only to find the rest missing from the jar. After ten minutes of searching, he found them in the bathroom sink for reasons he couldn't begin to explain.
Sunday morning, he opened his laptop to find the keyboard sticky with something honey? He didn't even own honey. Cleaning it took half the afternoon.
These weren't disasters, not really. Just a string of small, stupid problems.
But Samuel couldn't help muttering every so often, "Lord, seriously… am I on some kind of cosmic joke list?"
By the following week, he still wasn't thinking about patterns. No grand theory. No strange connections. Just the simple belief that life had decided to pile on.
He shrugged it off and kept writing.