The First Day of the Rest of Ivan's Life

Click. Click click went the old computer mouse under Ivan's skinny, pale fingers. A thick layer of oil and grease formed a shell around the mouse, a testament to the endless hours that Ivan had spent snacking on chips and pizza while in front of the blue glow of his old Macintosh computer, the only source of light in the dark, damp basement of his mother's house that Ivan called home.

He was 29. His birthday was in a week. You know the old saying, where if you turn 30 without having a single girlfriend, you become a wizard? If that were true, then Ivan was well on his way to becoming the wizard king. Apart from his mother, he hadn't seen another girl since he dropped out of high school when he was 16. Hell, he hadn't even seen his own mother in awhile, now that he only left the house between midnight and sunrise, when the sun wouldn't burn his deathly pale skin or hurt his weak, beady eyes. He had become a vampire. A pathetic one. Which no person would ever write a book about, or at least a book that would make millions of girls fall in love with him. If he were in some sort of writing material, it'd probably be in a blog post, or a National Geographic article about fake vampire sightings that nobody ever reads.

Ivan had spent the vast majority of his unproductive, meaningless youth in front of his computer screen, eating a diet made entirely of of pizza, chips, and the occasional stray rat that happened to pass between him and the monitor. It was a miracle that after 13 years of this, he hadn't turned into an amorphous blob of lard and grease. Maybe it was because of his ridiculous metabolism (haha). Or maybe it was because he starved himself, completely ignoring his hunger to maximize computer time, until he's just at the brink of death by starvation, where he gorges himself on snacks and pizza and repeats the cycle again. Yeah. That was probably it.

He didn't sleep. He didn't even blink anymore. Every second of every day, his eyes were open, and glued to the monitor, reading 4chan threads or playing games or watching things. On this particular day, Ivan had been doing the former. Little did he know, this particular 4chan thread would change his life. Forever.

His eyes scanned the images and words on /b/. More of the same. Ponies, roulettes, some guy posting about a bomb threat. Nothing new.

Then, suddenly, a picture of a muscular man with biceps as large as a Volkswagen Beetle. An alpha male thread. He hadn't seen one of these in awhile.

Quickly he read through the lives of these lucky, lucky people. Expensive cars, huge houses, a lot of 9/10 women. He was jealous. Alpha male threads always made him jealous.

Ivan looked at himself. His skin was white and corpselike. He hadn't felt the sun's warmth in years. He had no muscles, except for his right arm, which, for some reason, was significantly beefier than his left. He stared at his clothing, the same clothing he'd worn for one, two, fifteen weeks straight. It smelled foul and putrid. He hadn't bathed in months. Hell, he hadn't done anything in months except for stare at his computer.

His 30th birthday was fast approaching. He didn't want to become a wizard. He wanted to get a girl, get married, have kids, and abandon his kids to live a nomadic lifestyle in the Mexican desert. He wanted to live the American dream. So there, he decided.

"I'm gonna go outside and I'm gonna get married before my 30th birthday," He said proudly. Or at least, he tried to say. He hadn't used his eating hole for talking in such a long time, and all that came out was an incomprehensible string of vowels and consonants. Nevertheless, he stood up, hands in the air, ready to conquer the female world.

And his legs immediately gave out under him.



Slowly, he crawled out of the black, black cave that he'd been living in for the past 13 years and into the bright, white fluorescent lights that hung on the ceiling of his kitchen. His skin sizzled and cried out in pain from the light exposure. His eyes squinted instinctively, blurring his vision. He could barely see a fuzzy silhouette in the corner of the kitchen. It was his mother, talking on the phone, with her back turned to him.

"Hi, mom! I'm moving out!" Ivan yelled and his mother jumped up in shock. She turned around and saw a horrific, bony, rat-human on all fours, gazing straight at her with dead, slit-like eyes. It let out a low, ominous moan that oozed out of a crooked, sideways mouth, vaguely shaped like an evil smile, which revealed a row of brown, misshapen, crooked teeth. It was wearing her least favorite son's clothing, the son that she thought died five years ago.

Oh god. She had only heard about these rat monsters on the History Channel, but now there was one in her own kitchen. And it was after her.

Her heart stopped. She effing died.

But Ivan couldn't see that. His vision was too blurry. Shrugging, he slowly crawled like a tranquilized horse to the shower. He bathed and after a few minutes, he came out, only half as putrid smelling as before. He snuck into his father's closet and put on a large brown trenchcoat as well as a pair of sunglasses and wide brimmed brown hat to match. He had been in his cave for 13 years, but he wasn't stupid (or at least, he wasn't that much stupider compared to when he went in, he was still pretty stupid). He knew that the sun would make his skin burn, so he got some protective clothing. And he wanted to look extra stylish for the ladies. Chicks dig trenchcoats.

He crept to his front door slowly, on two legs now. His body ached. He wasn't used to moving around on two legs. But he needed to be bipedal. Ain't no woman gonna love him if he crawled like Smeagol.

Actually, no woman's gonna love him if he even remotely looked like Smeagol. And right now, he looked like Smeagol's taller, paler twin brother. This wouldn't do. So he decided.

"I'm gonna go to the tanning salon!" Ivan said. And he took his first step outside, into the real world.



His legs were throbbing. He was only a few yards from his house, but he was exhausted. He hadn't walked this far in years. But through sheer willpower, he pushed on.

In the distance, he saw a figure walking towards him, holding a rope with a smaller, furrier figure attached to it. As the figure came closer and closer, Ivan gasped. It was a woman.

He froze in his tracks and vibrated rigorously in nervousness. The girl wore a tight pink athletic shirt, revealing her flawless curves. She had her fair brown hair tied back in a ponytail and she wore petite white shorts that revealed much of her thighs. Ivan ogled pervertedly at her as she moved in his direction at a brisk pace, walking her dog. The sight of her made Ivan's Tummy Rumbly™.

"8/10," he said to himself, drooling. This was it. Opportunity had struck him right in his ugly face. He was gonna go for it. He stepped to the left, into the woman's path, blocking her. As she got closer and closer, she tried to turn to her left, but Ivan simply stepped to the right, cutting her off again. Soon, she was right in front of Ivan, with a confused look on her face. Her brown, furry dog started barking at Ivan's feet, but she made no effort to silence him.

"Quick, Ivan," Ivan coached himself in his mind, "Remember those Naruto Dating Sims you always play. What would Sasuke do?"

He leaned towards the woman, indiscreetly staring right at her breasts. Ivan started breathing harder and harder as he became more and more excited. He knew he had to say something soon to break the ice, but what?

Suddenly, he had it. The perfect ice breaker. Without breaking eye-to-chest contact, a few words managed to escape from his shivering lips.

"N-n-nice... ch-chu-chunks..." The lady stood there, dumbfounded. Her dog barked louder and louder at Ivan, who took loud, open-mouth breaths as the women's hypnotic chest lumps put him in a trance. Slowly, Ivan's toxic crypt breath escaped from his breathing tube and into the woman's scent receptors. Immediately, the girl reacted as if she had been hit in the face by a brick. Her eyes watered in pain as the scent began to singe her retinas. Her dog barked and barked, but soon, it too was paralyzed by Ivan's crippling mouth odor. It whimpered towards the woman's legs, and soon, the woman took off like a rocket, crying in confusion and pain. Ivan stared at her backside as she got further and further from him, until she fell to the ground in pure agony.

"Nailed it." Ivan pumped his fist in success.



An hour. Two hours. Three hours passed by and Ivan walked on like a blind puppy. He had no idea how to get to the tanning salon. He might have been going in circles around his house, he might have been in a completely different country by now. He didn't know. Life would be so much easier if he had an overhead map tattooed onto his eyeballs.

He was practically drenched in sweat. It looked like he had just taken a shower with his clothes on. He was so tired. His legs were wobbly and he was uncertain how much longer he could continue until his legs would fail him again.

Then, salvation. A man sitting on a wooden park bench beside the pavement. He could ask for directions!



The middle-aged man sat alone, in the tranquil scenery around him. A light summer breeze blew by, gently ruffling the newspaper that he read. He wore a dark blue coat and brown pants that seemed to be tailored specifically to fit him. A brown fedora covered his white, balding hair.

The man took a deep breath. Yep. Just another day in his life. And as he turned the page, he saw it.

A starving albino Mexican gorilla charging straight at him, foaming at the mouth. It wore a brown trenchcoat and a brown hat that it must have stolen off the corpse of its last rape victim. The disgusting, unemployed beast was 50, 60 meters away, and yet the man could already smell his ghoulish taquito breath, which almost made the man fall backwards in shock. It was fast approaching, limping like a bleached zombie towards him, thirsting for his organ fluids.

The man literally shat a brick.

But right now, he had no time to change his trousers. His fight or flight response kicked in and the middle-aged man managed to sprint at Usain Bolt levels of speed, despite his arthritic problems and his irritable bowel syndrome.

But Ivan had speed of his own. He was quickly catching up to the man, desperate for directions to the tanning salon. Further and further, the man ran through the park, and close and closer Ivan got. The scene quickly attracted the attention of other parkgoers, obviously shocked at the sight of a pale escaped orangutan assaulting an old man. A few whipped out their smart phones and recorded the spectacle for future upload to YouTube. A few whipped out their normal phones and called animal control, in sheer panic.

The man, wanting to measure the lead he'd managed to obtain, turned his head back. Ivan the gorilla was only a few strides behind him. He didn't see the rock that protruded out of the Earth immediately in front of him, causing the man to trip flat on his face. He quickly turned on his back, attempting to reverse crab walk away from the horrific pale beast. In his mind, his life flashed before his eyes. Death by albino Mexican gorilla.

"Not like this... anything but this..." the man screamed as Ivan sprinted closer and closer to him. But Ivan was about to stop. He was about to ask for directions.

However, at that very moment, his legs gave out from under him. He fell face first into the man's groin. The man shrieked in pain.

"It's eating them! It's eating my reproductive apparatus!" The man cried as a small crowd of people surrounded the two, gasping.

Ivan lifted his face from the man's pelvis. He slowly picked himself up, but he struggled. His entire body ached. He looked up at the man in front of him, wailing and grasping his male parts. Then, he looked around at the people that had gathered around him, mouths agape.

Then, suddenly, the crowd parted and two men wearing blue uniforms ran through, each with a taser in their hands.

"Animal control, coming through!" The duo yodeled and simultaneously, they pulled the trigger. The gun launched electric prongs that burrowed deep into Ivan's pale white skin. Immediately, thousands of electric volts ran through Ivan's feeble body. He shook violently on the ground, like an epileptic trout out of water that had just watched the Porygon episode of Pokemon.

He was dead.





Author's Note: Words cannot express how much fun I had writing this. It started out as a joke that my friend (the titular character of this story) scribbled on my planner that I eventually took seriously. And boy, am I glad I did.

Hopefully, you got the little jokes here and there and hopefully it was mildly funny for you guys too. I don't wanna be that one guy that laughs hard at his own jokes while everyone else just stands there in awkward silence. And yes, the majority of the humor's from absurdity of the situation. Deal with it.

And yeah, the ending kind of sucks. I didn't know how to finish it off, but if I do end up thinking of a better ending, I'll revise it in the future.

Anyway, this story's obviously a lot less deep than my last three, and for a few reasons. One, because it's humorous, and humor doesn't demand a lot of depth. Two, because I'm literally writing this on Tuesday night and I still have a lot of homework/AP studying to do. And three, because I'm actually working on a script for a short film right now, which is my current priority. I won't go into too many details of the short film, but it'll be pretty strange, I guarantee that. If you guys are interested, I could post that here too, since it technically counts as writing.