Things were as ordinary as they come in the quiet hamlet of Nowhere, Middle America. Howard - locals called him "Humble Howard" - was taking his usual evening stroll along the town square after a long day of averagecy. The air was punctuated by the soft hum of townsfolk chatter, a distant serenade from the melodious church bell, and the occasional bark of a rabid raccoon.
Howard, with the weary gait of a man carrying the burden of unspectacular existence, trudged along the cobblestone path. His gaze, usually low and avoiding of others, suddenly locked onto a peculiar sight that one could only describe as wildly out of place in the somber backdrop of Nowhere.
There, in true contradicting audacity, stood Jimmy.
Jimmy wasn't an average Joe, by no means. No, Jimmy was a character of such eccentricity that it rivaled a peacock in a pigeon flock. He was the kind of man who claimed things - remarkable, mind-boggling things - that made the rest murmur, snigger, even recoil. Jimmy purportedly had a constellation for a heart, and from his fingers, he claimed to command lightning bolts.
Howard, against his humdrum nature, approached Jimmy tentatively.
"Oh, Jimmy..." began Howard, voice softer than a mouse's whistle. Jimmy glanced over, an impassive expression etched onto his weather-beaten face.
Howard had meant to pass along the news about the factory job in the neighboring town – a decent position for a common man, one could say. But, Jimmy dramatically cut him short mid-sentence. A ripple of tension spread across the town square, as eccentricity met modesty, head-on.
"Ohhh don't you f-ing 'Oh Jimmy' me!" Jimmy's voice echoed enigmatically against the otherwise peaceful ambience. Howard shrunk back, but Jimmy rolled onwards, like a snowball gathering speed and volume as it careened down a mountainside.
"You look down on me? You pity me? Walk away. That's right, Howard," he snarled, brimming with an intense bravado.
"Want to know why I didn't take the job, Howard?" Howard nodded, almost imperceptibly. He was rather curious, after all.
"Because it's too SMALL. I don't care about it. It's nothing to me. It's a bacterium." Jimmy spat the words with such ferocity that even the town's aged statue of the founding father seemed to squirm uncomfortably.
Howard stood there, rivaling the statue in his silent shock. He had never seen this side of Jimmy before. An unheard-of scale of grandiosity pulsed through Jimmy's words, roused into an uncanny spectacle by his quirky persona.
"I travel in worlds you can't even imagine. You can't conceive of what I'm capable of," Jimmy continued on his roll, his words growing into an increasingly erratic monologue. Howard, wide-eyed, witnessed the unfolding spectacle between bouts of disconcerted glances exchanged with the other townsfolk.
"I'm so far beyond you. I'm like a god in human clothing. Lightning bolts shoot from my fingertips!" With this grand declaration, Jimmy ended his discourse, leaving a stunned Howard and a once tranquil town square wrapped in a thick silence.
As the bizarre incident drew to a close, Howard could only stare. Stare at Jimmy, stare at what could have been an emblem of his own mundanity. Howard was a man drastically changed, his perception of Jimmy, of himself, and indeed the very idea of 'average' turned on its head.
In the end, it wasn't so important if lightning really did fly from Jimmy’s fingertips. What mattered more was the discovery of the spark that lay dormant in the hearts of all, even the humblest ones. The very spark that, given a chance, could turn the humdrum Howard into a lightning-bearer himself. And so, it was in the quiet town of Nowhere, when Humble Howard met Lightning-Fingered Jimmy, the ordinary became extraordinary, albeit absurdly so.