The Twelve Regrets of Hiscurles

Chapter One, For Lack of a Better Title

It was a shitty day to be a skinny young man called Avecfroid, which was bad news for Avecfroid. To Avecfroid, this came as a big subprise, which is the opposite of a surprise, because he couldn't remember the last day that hadn't been a shitty day to be a fair-haired young man called Avecfroid. Sure, there had been days, once, glorious halcyon days of wonderfulness that were not shitty days to be a somewhat short young man called Avecfroid. Some of them might even have been – if there ever indeed was such a thing – good days to be a weak-shouldered, plain, slightly rodent-faced young man named Avecfroid. If he tried hard, if he really made an effort, he could faintly recall them through the shimmering haze of memory, twinkling at him with remembered bliss like a bejewelled desert city through a mirage.

But that was in the past. These days, the one thing Avecfroid knew with a bowel-knotting certainty even before he woke up in the morning on any given day was that it was going to be a shitty day to be Avecfroid. With years of experience under his belt, he could tell. And even taking that as a baseline, this day was really piling on the excrement. Already Avecfroid felt like a very small mole that had accidentally tunnelled into the bottom of a communal latrine, and the shitstorm that had descended upon him today showed no sign of abating.

It was a shitstorm of many parts. There was the nasty, vicious, wrath-of-the-gods kind of storm that currently raged around him, to begin with. The sky had already been black as ink when he woke up that morning, heralding another shitty day right from the start. But it had, of course, managed to balance on the threshold of bursting until Avec was exactly halfway through a stretch of utterly featureless land completely devoid of anything that might offer a shivering traveller even the most paltry protection against the elements, at which point it had let loose upon him with all the enthusiasm of an arachnophobic drunkard who's spotted a spider in the toilet bowl.

And now here he was, several miserable, soaking hours later, naked and cowering in a corner of the abandoned old ruin of a hut he had chosen to take shelter, make fruitless attempts at convincing damp wood to burn, and take off his clothes to dry in. The rain was still pissing down outside, which was an improvement, because until a few minutes ago it had been pissing sideways. Really, actually, horizontally sideways. What wasn't an improvement was the mythologically oversized and clearly hungry serpent that had just slithered into the hut.

It was currently slowly swaying from side to side within striking distance of some of Avec's softer bits, deterred only by its reflection in the shaving mirror that he had managed to shield himself with. It was currently still trying to decide what to do about this interloping rival that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere to take up station between it and its intended snack, but since your average serpent's modes of interaction with other living things are limited to "bite", "mate with" and "kill/eat", it was not so much a question of whether as of how long remained until Avec became a herpetological statistic.

What was currently going through Avecfroid's mind was a seething sense of injustice at the way the world treated him, had always treated him, was treating him at this particular moment and, most of all, was going to treat him very soon. The futility, the helplessness, the feeling that no matter what he tried or did, something or someone somewhere had pre-ordained that Avecfroid's place in life was in its anus came to expression as a silent scream in his mind, six words unheard by the outside world but blazing like giant burning letters in the sky to him:

OH SHIT SHIT SHIT I'M FUCKED!!!

Damn damn damn shitty country and its damn damn damn bloody gods and damn damn double damn its bastard bandits and damn damn destructodamn bloody bloody monsters! The place was driving Avec seventeen different kinds of up-the-fucking-wall nuts, twelve of which grew on trees that humanity had never even heard of before. If something didn't go his way soon, he'd go orders of both magnitude and biology more mental than just bat shit crazy. Or, of course, six feet under. Was anything worth going through this?

Well, yes, actually, said the little part of his subconscious that always felt reluctantly obliged to be completely and impartially honest, although that does seem a bit less relevant right now. It quickly fell silent as all the other parts of Avec's subconscious yelled at it to STFU.

It's all so fucking unfair, he thought. So fucking unfair. What a subprise.

And indeed it was.

But the thing about subprises is – they're really not that different from surprises.

All it takes to turn a subprise into a surprise is for one little unexpected thing to happen.

Even something as cheap as coincidence can be enough.