August 13 - Friday, the 13th

Rachel Simpson never considered herself a superstitious person, but all that changed on Friday, August 13.
It was a normal Friday until she saw a black cat crossing the street. She had plenty of time before she needed to be at work, so she followed the cat into the alley it skittered down, thinking it would be fun to tell her co-workers, especially Cathy, who was superstitious, that she'd done so. This was also the reason why she followed the cat under a ladder and--perhaps a bit impulsively--broke a mirror she saw leaning against a dumpster along with some other household items that someone had thrown out.
It was immediately afterwards that she saw the guy standing near the dumpster, and she jumped a bit.
"Sorry I scared you," he said. "I always seem to do that. Anyway, I just got your call. Got here as fast as I could." He was blocking her exit.
"Um, I didn't call anyone, and I don't even know you." She backed away from him and furtively checked to see if there was another way out of the alley.
"We might have overlooked the black cat and the ladder," he said, ignoring her, "but there's no way we can ignore something as brazen as deliberately breaking a mirror--especially on a Friday the 13th."
"Sorry, but what on earth are you talking about?"
"Oliver Van Horn," he said offering her his card. She hesitantly took it and read: Universal Cosmological Enterprises, Accounting Division.
"We're the 'maintain the order and balance in the universe' people," he said, using his fingers as quotation marks. "And you've got a serious luck debt you need to balance, Ms. Simpson."
"How do you know my name? Who are you?"
"It's basic cosmological accounting, Ms. Simpson. Find a four leaf clover, rub a rabbit's foot, so on so forth, you get good luck credit and good things happen to you. Have a black cat cross your path, walk under a ladder, break a mirror--again, all on a Friday the 13th--and you incur bad luck debt and bad things happen to you. With me so far?"
He took her silence as a yes.
"Usually we let these things play themselves out in a sort of behind the scenes capacity, but in special cases such as yours, we have to step in and intervene. You see, it's barely 10 in the morning, and you've already racked up well in excess of seven years of bad luck. This can't go on. Now, I'm here for two reasons. One, to tell you to knock it off already. And two, to put you on a cosmological debt repayment plan."
"Wait. What?"
"There are two ways we can do this. One way is you can sign this affidavit agreeing to stop deliberately bringing bad luck upon yourself and accept the consequences of the bad luck that is due you. In your case, we'll call it seven years even."
She let him continue.
"Or you can agree to a luck deferral program in which you pass your luck on to someone else of your choosing. It may surprise you to hear that most people go with option one."
"Wait. First of all, I can't believe I'm even having this conversation, but OK. Secondly, I can just pass my bad luck to someone else?"
"That's right."
"But then what happens to me?"
"You go about your life and try to be a good person."
"And someone else has my bad luck? That hardly seems fair."
"Fair is a pretty relative and subjective term, Rachel. Besides, depending on who gets your bad luck--if you decide to go this route--this person may or may not have already racked up a tremendous amount of good luck. In which case, their good luck and your bad luck cancel each other out and you both go about your lives."
"Yeah, but who would have that much good luck?"
"Probably someone who was really superstitious."
Cathy from work.
The name came to Rachel immediately, and as soon as it did, she had pretty much made up her mind. As superstitious as Cathy was, she had to have banked an enormous amount of good luck credit. Surely it would be enough to offset her debt. And even if it wasn't, Cathy was such an optimistic person, she probably wouldn't even recognize anything bad that happened to her as the results of bad luck. She would just shrug it off and keep going.
Rachel made her decision and signed the necessary papers, including the one which stated that all her bad luck would return to her 13-fold if she ever told anyone about her meeting with Oliver Van Horn. Then she went to work unable to conceal her sly grin, feeling like she'd gotten away with something. But what she didn't realize--what she couldn't have known--was that Oliver's colleagues in the Karma Division of Universal Cosmological Enterprises had witnessed the whole thing. And they never let anybody bargain their way out of anything.

(Co-written with Misako Goto)