Every day when the early morning sun was hovering just below the horizon (on the days he wasn't blackout drunk), Samson would put the noose around his neck. He'd originally tied it what, a month ago? It could have been two or three by now, as a cocktail of SSRIs and vodka had started to turn time into a haze of half-remembered days. The calendar on the wall was two years out of date, the clock on the stove blinked all zeroes after a power outage (he didn't have the manual to figure out how to reset it), and his cell phone was at the bottom of the lake out front.

Samson learned how to tie a noose in Scouts. Or more accurately, he figured it out himself fucking around with ropes while the other kids were following instructions. It had been a poor approximation of the real thing as used for generations of cruelty, but he'd tied it secure and gotten it to tighten around another boy's neck. It was a joke, obviously, but they didn't see it that way. That was the last time he went to Scouts, but only the first of many nooses he'd tie over two decades. This one felt nice and strong, secured to a beam in the roof of the old cottage's attic with a stiff hitch knot. It was an old polypropylene rope his daddy used to use to keep the boat in place by the docks. Maybe the reason he hadn't kicked out that stepladder yet was the image of this stupid fucking blue-and-yellow striped rope around his rotting corpse-neck when they found him, bloated and maggot-ridden and leaking fluids all over the attic floorboards. "What a pathetic bastard," they'd say, and they'd be spot on. But the walk to the hardware store was long, and he sold the truck to stock up on liquor, so he was caught between laziness and his last remaining shreds of dignity.