May 23 - The Good Deed

He was about to cross the street when he saw the girl's bicycle topple over into the one next to it, setting off a domino effect that resulted in nine toppled bicycles. Everybody else walked by, pretending not to see her, and he was on a tight schedule himself, but he ran over to her, and helped her pick up the bikes one by one.
This good deed caused him to miss the walk signal, which caused him to miss his bus, which caused him to be late for his interview, which caused him to feel flustered, which caused him to blow the interview, which caused him to not get the job, which caused a big argument with his girlfriend, which caused her to dump him and kick him out of her apartment, which led to where he was now, which was jobless, homeless, and reluctantly single--all because he'd helped that girl pick up those bicycles. What was that saying? No good deed goes unpunished? No kidding.
But a few months passed and he got back on his feet. He found a new job (with better pay than the one he'd missed out on when he blew the interview), moved into a new place (more spacious than his last one, and with a better view), and found that single life wasn't all bad.
And a few more weeks down the road, he saw in the paper that the company he'd failed to get the job with was being investigated for tax fraud. The DA was handing out indictments like they were party favors, and he almost certainly would've gotten one, too, if he'd gotten that middle management job.
And that girlfriend who dumped him? Turned out she was a meth addict. Cleaned her new live-in boyfriend out after getting him hooked as well, and they were both evicted from the apartment after falling behind on the rent. Not that it mattered too much. The whole building was condemned and shut down when it was discovered that it had been built on top of an old toxic waste dump. Several former residents were sick.
But not him. He'd gotten out just in time, and the more he thought about it, the more he was able to see that it was all because he'd helped that girl with the bicycles. If he had ignored her like everyone else and made the light and caught the bus and arrived on time to the interview and aced it and got the job and stayed in that building with his (meth head) girlfriend, things would have turned out a lot different. Maybe punishment wasn't what he'd gotten from that good deed after all.