The day after I won the lottery I saw in the mirror I looked a little thin and when I weighed myself I’d lost ten pounds. So that explained the cheekbones and abs, first time I’d ever seen them.

I went downstairs to make coffee and remembered my wife and kids had left to go on vacation (my inlaws were gone too so I had to stay home to care for the bees) for a month so I only made half as much. While the coffee was dripping I heard a sound outside like a machinegun behind the barn. I guessed it was the woodpecker pecking at the stop sign again so I went outside to shoo it away.

I heard voices behind the barn, though, and when I peeked through the peekhole I saw gangsters had gunned down a dozen attorneys and property developers. So no woodpecker after all. The boss gangster finished tying a woman to a chair and they put cannisters of gasoline everywhere then left. I waited for them to get out of sight then walked over to the woman.

“Untie me please,” she said when I removed the gag. Wow, I thought, Charlize Theron. Or someone who looks exactly like her. Bees were buzzing everywhere. I hoped they weren’t going to swarm.

“What’s going on?” I asked her.

“Look, could we talk about this somewhere else?” she said. “There’s a timer on that gasoline, it’s set to ignite in five minutes.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “This barn’s way overinsured.” Then I thought, though, probably they wouldn’t pay if it was arson, would they?

The damned bees were swarming. They were all over Charlize. “Stay calm,” I said. “Don’t excite the bees. Sit still and you’ll be fine. What’s this?” I asked. It was a large musical instrument case of some kind.

“It’s a Stradivarius cello,” the woman said. “It’s worth a million dollars.”

I opened the case. There was no instrument inside, just papers and diamonds.

The woman laughed. “They left the wrong case! They took the cello with them! That there is ten billion dollars in negotiable bonds and another ten in fine diamonds! Ouch!”

“I told you not to move around or shout,” I said. “Look, this is your problem,” I said, removing a queen bee from her lap. “How’d you get here?” I said to the queen bee. I walked over around the barn and replaced the queen bee in an empty hive. Immediately it started filling up with swarming bees.

Then I went back and filled a wheelbarrow with the contents of the cello case and wheeled that over to my truck. Then I left a note on the kitchen table for my wife not to let any gangsters in should she get home before I did. Then I loaded the actress-looking woman into my truck too, mostly untied, and put one of the smaller dead attorneys into the chair where she’d been sitting and tied him on and covered him with more gas. Then I moved the beehives into safety.

We drove away. Those gangsters knew how to set a fire – that barn just exploded. Of course it was really dry, but still.

We had a Stradivarius to liberate.

The end.

But I’m already a lucky guy…

A lucky guy who loses ten pounds! That’s it!

Probably a good idea to follow D’s advice, though.

Or something about an incredibly lucky guy. Or about a guy who gets a promotion.