It didn’t take a rocket scientist, or more appropriately a psychiatrist, to figure out that Nelson Wartson was depressed. He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, and frequently quoted Kurt Vonnegut’s “smoking is a classy way to commit suicide.” Once, a friend who studied American Literature at a hoity-toity university told Nelson this wasn’t a direct quote, more a paraphrase of the real thing. Nelson responded by stubbing a cigarette out in his friend’s eye. It was New Years’ Eve. He hasn’t talked to that friend since then.

At 81, he had outgrown the need for friends. His only acquaintance was the Gold Duck depicted on his favored brand of cigarettes. At age 75, he discovered he could order his cigarettes from the Internet, so he no longer had a need for the convenience store on the corner. He no longer left the house.

Nelson had at one point owned a cat, a small calico named Ralph. He never cared for the little bastard, but kept it around to amuse himself by blowing smoke in its face and listening to its coughs. Ralph died a few years ago, and Nelson ran him through the garbage disposal.

Cigarette ashes and butts covered every inch of floor, filled every crack in the ceiling, sprawled into any space that may otherwise have been empty. Nelson stopped cleaning up after himself sometime around the death of his wife Lillian. He never intended to fill the house with butts on butts and thick cakes of ash on every surface, but he also had no interest in cleaning out his ashtrays. Lillian always cleaned out the ash trays. Over time, the waste overflowed.

Eventually, a concerned mailman would call the police after noticing Nelson had not collected his cigarette packages for three weeks. The police would enter the house, and discover the body face-down in a living room ash pile, and the coroner would determine the death derived from “natural causes.”

Until then, Nelson sat in his chair, inhaling his classy Gold Duck.