I went down.
Hard.
My backward momentum, combined with the unyielding reality of the toolbox, sent me tumbling over it. For a split second, I was airborne, a 47-year-old man performing an involuntary, and deeply undignified, somersault.
And then I crashed through the porch railing.
The same railing I had spent all of yesterday installing.
The same railing I had checked for stability, for code compliance, for aesthetic appeal.
The same railing that was supposed to keep people from, you know, falling off the porch. Apparently, it was not designed to withstand the impact of a middle-aged man who had just been assaulted by a suicidal goose and tripped over his own goddamn toolbox.
The wood splintered with a sound that broke my heart more than the fall itself. I landed on the other side, not on the soft grass I had so lovingly cultivated, but in the waiting embrace of my wheelbarrow.
The wheelbarrow was full of concrete mix. I had been planning to set a new fence post today, the final item on my punch list. The universe, it seemed, had other plans.
The bag of Quikrete had split on impact, and now I was wearing about forty pounds of it. I looked like a ghost, a grey, dusty specter of a man who had just been attacked by a bird and was now sitting in a wheelbarrow contemplating his life choices.
If anyone had been around to see this, it would have been the most viral video on the internet. But there was no one. There was never anyone. That was the whole point of building the house out here.
The impact was jarring, a cloud of fine grey powder erupting around me.
I was now sitting in a wheelbarrow, dazed, covered in concrete dust, and still trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.
The house, my beautiful house, was now marred by a shattered railing. The goose lay on the porch, twitching, its kamikaze mission complete.
And then the wheelbarrow started to roll.
The lawn, you see, was not perfectly flat. It had a gentle, almost imperceptible slope down towards the ornamental pond I had dug at the bottom of the property.
A slope I had designed myself, for drainage purposes. I was now a victim of my own excellent landscaping.
The wheelbarrow picked up speed. I was a passenger on the world's shittiest, most uncomfortable roller coaster.
I tried to bail out, but my legs were tangled in the handles, and the concrete dust was in my eyes. I was a human cannonball in a rusty metal bucket.
I crashed through the fence. The new fence.
The one I had just finished staining last week. Cedar, naturally. I'd hand-picked each board at the lumber yard, rejecting anything with excessive knots or warping.
I'd cut each picket to the exact same length, installed them with a laser level to ensure perfect alignment. It had taken me three full days. And now it was kindling, scattered across the lawn like the shattered remnants of my dignity.
The sound of splintering cedar was another dagger in my soul. The wheelbarrow, now free of the fence's flimsy resistance, launched off a small ramp formed by a pile of leftover lumber I hadn't gotten around to stacking yet.
For the second time in less than a minute, I was airborne. This time, I had a clear view of my destination. The pond. My beautiful, tranquil, ornamental pond. The one with the decorative fountain I had imported from Italy, a ridiculous extravagance that had cost me a month's budget.
I landed in the pond.
Time, in moments of extreme crisis, does a funny thing. It stretches. Every millisecond becomes a small eternity, a frozen snapshot of your impending doom.
I had time to think, as I sailed through the air in my concrete-dusted wheelbarrow, about how spectacularly stupid this was. I had time to catalog every poor decision that had led to this moment.
The goose, the toolbox, the wheelbarrow, the slope, the fence. It was a perfect storm of incompetence and bad luck, a Rube Goldberg machine of death designed by a malevolent universe with a sick sense of humor.
I hit the water with a splash that would have been comical if it weren't so tragic. The impact wasn't as bad as I'd expected. The water was only about eighteen inches deep. But my trajectory was perfect, my aim unerring. My head connected with the solid marble base of the Italian fountain with a sickening, final crack.
The world went from a chaotic mess of goose feathers and concrete dust to a silent, watery green. I was upside down in eighteen inches of water, my head throbbing with a pain that was already starting to feel distant.
I could see the sky, a pale, indifferent blue, through the shimmering surface of the water. I could see the house, my house, standing there, almost perfect, a monument to a life that was about to be cut short in the most ludicrous way imaginable.
My lungs burned. I was still clutching the nail. One single, solitary nail. The last piece of the puzzle. The final, mocking testament to a job left undone.
My last thought, as the darkness closed in, was not of my life flashing before my eyes, not of regrets or loved ones. It was a single, crystal-clear, and deeply heartfelt sentiment that summed up my entire existence.
Are you fucking kidding me?
And then, nothing. Just darkness.
A profound, absolute darkness that swallowed everything. No light at the end of the tunnel, no choir of angels, no life flashing before my eyes. Just the cold, silent void.
I was dead. Leo Mercer, age 47, killed by a goose and his own landscaping. RIP
It was the kind of death that would have been a footnote in a local newspaper, a brief, absurd anecdote that people would chuckle at over their morning coffee.
"Did you hear about that guy who built a house and then died before he could even hang the sign? Got taken out by a bird. What are the odds?"
The odds, as it turned out, were 100%. Because it had happened.
And now I was dead.
And my house, my beautiful, perfect house, would stand empty, a monument to a life cut short by the universe's twisted sense of irony.