Prompt: Buckle, Title: AND GOOD RIDDANCE in misc. flash fiction

Michael Cecconi of Little Falls, forty-four, shuffled off his mortal coil Monday December 4th, tumbling down three flights of stairs in a Victorian McMansion converted into a library while attempting to carry an artificial Christmas tree to the first floor, breaking his goddamned neck.

As the only employee of the library over five-foot-ten, this was the fourth season of the doomed escapade and it’s astonishing it took the task this long to kill him. Medical examiners can merely theorize somewhere in the bumbling attempts to balance that shedding faux-fir, one of his knees buckled, quickly devolving into a Three-Stooges-esque cascading of prat-falls, bruises and blunt force trauma, culminating in his horrific-but-refreshingly-traditional-comical end. Reportedly he howled out Disney’s beloved Goofy’s death-cry “YA-HA-HOOOWIE” with his last breath. In a further irony, the library’s new elevator to the third floor will be completed by the next holiday season, drawing posthumous comparison between his hilarious circumstance of extinction with the film cliché of the aging police detective who is killed one week before his retirement party.

Michael devoted the balance of his life to the high-minded, selfless and noble aim of proving his intelligence by trying to be funny. Where he could’ve gotten such a backward-ass idiotic sense of what proves smarts will remain a question for the ages but is most likely in some way associated with the source of all his foibles: his parents let him watch too much goddamned television when he was a kid. A promising student, while the top three scholars in his high school class went off in search of a medical doctorate or law degree, Michael screwed off to film school close enough to home to still do laundry on a three-day weekend, to belatedly learn how to drink alcohols and smoke marijuana cigarettes. Upon his death, over two decades later, he still owed the film school roughly twelve grand. If they still want it now, they’re free to grab shovels and garnish the dental fillings from his now rotting corpse. Bastards, the utter bastards, blood from a stone, the bastards.

Michael never wed, despite marrying two women, a joke he loved to repeat about getting one of those Universal Life Church cards to officiate the nuptials of a lesbian couple. It was his way of trying to signal his attempts to be a good straight ally but, like everything else, he ran it into the goddamn ground because he thought he was so clever and it just really annoyed everyone else.

In lieu of flowers or donations, Michael’s family requests that if you are a beautiful woman, you start claiming you were always secretly in love with him. That you were just about to leave your disgusting redneck husband or loser hipster boyfriend for him, but gee-gollies-goshes, the timing was just wrong. That tree and those stairs just worked too fast! You don’t even have to be telling the truth, it’s just about the effort. He would’ve wanted it that way. It would’ve made him smile.