prompt: rank, title: all the king's horses in misc. flash fiction

He wasn’t always like this. He’d been a middle-class careerist, a suburban dad and husband. The manicured lawn, picket fence, two-car garage, the whole schmear. The good life. He wasn’t rich or powerful but he had everything the Twentieth Century everyman was supposed to desire. The very picture of the Levittown rank-and-file, the lowercase-D version of the American Dream, the water-tight sensible life of George Geef.

Then tragedy struck. His wife had gone into town for a new hat and was standing on a sidewalk, window shopping, when a grand piano fell from the sky, flattening her into a pancake of warped flesh and shattered bones. Hard enough to deal with losing someone so quickly, so randomly, so young, but what finished the job of breaking his brain was how silly, how stupid a way it was to lose her. Not by disease or mugging, not in childbirth or a car-crash. No, in broad daylight, with the snap of a strap and a sickening KRASH-KA-TWANG. It was God’s own insult to injury, so cartoonish, so slapstick, so… goofy. That’s what the shambles of George’s mind became. Goofy.

The universe had gone absent-minded, brainless so that’s what he became as well. Idly humming simple tunes from his youth, tripping and stumbling, going through the motions of suburban life blankly, mechanically, everything ending in disaster. His friends Mick and Don did their best to slowly coax him out of it, playing along with this new “Goofy” persona in hopes it’d pass. They tried to get him into fly-fishing or skiing, swimming, anything, any seed he’d be able to rebuild his mind around, but nothing stuck. The broken shell of their friend was willing to try anything, hopelessly malleable yet unable to do any of it competently. That sweet idiot who called himself “Goofy” would always screw up, often injuriously, the dark passenger of grief muffled by faked incompetence but always working subconsciously towards some “accidental” suicide. The more ridiculous his death the better, the more darkly hilarious his ending, the more like his lost lover.

They’d named their son “George Junior” but this new Goof couldn’t even manage to process his old name on his son. In his scattered Goofy way, he still loved his boy, of course, but blanked on that ancient, cursed moniker. Trying to remember what he called this creature, his eyes caught a hairdryer’s power switch and started calling him “Max” and it stuck as his nickname for the rest of his days, never mind that George immediately “accidentally” dropped the hairdryer in the tub, nearly electrocuting himself to death in the goofiest way.

His next-door neighbor Pete couldn’t manage to just let him slide like his other friends and took the opposite tack, being an absolute dick to him, hoping rage might awaken him when kindness clearly could not. It didn’t work, either. For the rest of his days, that’s all that was left, no more thoughts, no more coherency, barely conscious at all. No. Just Goofy.