He sat in the chair that was comfortable except that it didn't support his head. If he leaned his head back so the chair fully supported it, he was looking at the ceiling.  He stuffed a pillow behind his head and immediately griped that it shoved his head, uncomfortably, too far forward.  That someone could design a chair with such an obvious flaw irritated him.

He sat in the chair anyway and brooded over the poor design of the chair.  Earlier that day, a friend had sent him a text message with a link to a story about a boat wreck that had killed the friend's wife. The boat wreck happened at the wedding reception of the friend's wife's sister with whom he himself had once had a short relationship.  It ended rather unceremoniously when he graduated from college and moved away and, years later, the wife's sister was shot and killed by the man she married the day her sister was killed by the boat. He thought this was a bit screwed up. 

Lately he had come to fret over his isolation in life. He was married with two children, fine boys of six and eleven. He had some money, not rich, but comfortable to the point he didn't live in fear of not having a job for a spell. He had friends through work but rarely socialized with them otherwise. His college friends were scattered and he had no interest in any relationships prior to college. He believed himself an introvert and seemed determined to prove it until lately, when he began to worry about growing old and having no one to talk to. He realized he feared loneliness but was unsure what to do about it. He rarely met anyone he enjoyed being around and believed most people to fall into two categories: a braggart or a bore. 

He wondered of the parallel paths his life could have taken had he made slightly different choices in the past.  Today, for example, he thought about the fact that he wasn't at the wedding where his friend's wife was killed. He was in a new relationship with the woman who would become his wife and thought it inappropriate to attend the wedding of a previous lover.  He had no doubt that had he gone, he would have been on the boat with the friend and his wife. He was very fond of them and enjoyed spending time with them.

 What would have happened, he wondered?  

The propellor of the boat that struck the boat his friend and his friend's wife were in severed his leg at the knee and decapitated his wife.  His leg was hanging on by gristle and sinew and he was thrashing in the black lake water desperately trying to hold his wife's head onto her body. Somehow he was fished out without drowning and his leg was reconstructed so that you would never know that it once dangled uselessly at the knee. There was nothing to be done for his wife. They had been married for about a year. He thought that this too was a bit screwed up. It seemed so random, like life was a big wheel of fortune and you were either lucky or you weren't. He wondered when his luck would run out.