"Good luck befriend thee, son; for, at thy birth
The Fairery ladies daunc't upon the hearth;
The drowsie nurse hath sworn she did them spie
Come tripping to the room where thou didst lie,
And, sweetly singing round about thy bed,
Strew all their blessings on thy sleeping head."

– John Milton

Clement Moore waxed poetic, not just about Christmas, but of families, warm hearths, snuggling together for warmth and blessing. Where even mice slept soundly, and tranquility soothed the fiery heart of man.

Well, this wasn't The Night Before Christmas, and sleep eluded Frank like the smoke of his corncob pipe spilled into the air, vanishing before his exhausted eyes.

Instead, he swirled a short, blocky tumbler of light amber liquor: Macallan, an 18-year single-malt scotch he kept around when things went wrong. Frank was hardly an alcoholic, for the bottle—this particular contemplation brew—was only the second he'd ever opened since his friends ushered him into manhood with a long night of shots about a thousand years ago.

God Damn, I feel so old. No 38-year-old man generally claimed themselves a fountain of eternal youth, but in Frank's case, having the Luck of the Devil was almost as sweet a temptation. It's easy to feel young when everything goes your way.

But the freshly opened bottle, probably twice its labeled age, stood half empty. For a man who made a game of breaking Murphy's Law, it was rare indeed he resorted to drinking his troubles into an addled stew. What the hell went wrong?

Samson. The fucking dog; the one nearly as old as Kyle. The one they bought fully grown when the boy was five and he begged and begged for a pet. Trained by an iron-willed German man with strange ideas concerning pack behavior and dominance, but his guard-dogs were renoun, and Saint Bernard or no, Samson would tear apart a burglar and refrain from even glancing at a raw, bloody steak six inches from his nose until given a codeword. Say hallelujah!

And that was it. No questions—and why should there be? He was Frank fucking Cemtes, who could walk into a room full of roughneck prisoners recently informed he personally pissed in their oatmeal, and walk out having made a dozen new friends, many of which would probably die for him. Gamble—a terrible vice that—and he'd always win when it mattered most. Oh, he lost an occasional hand, but when the pot spread across the table, and his poker buddies were smoking fat Cubans and mopping sweat off their temples, it was always Frank that laid down a Full House, or completed the high stud.

He knew it, too.

He'd experimented for years, trying to quantize the ridiculous control he held over fate, judging the limits, mapping the bounds. The funny thing was, he never found any. Small things went his way, large things went further, and the really life-changing stuff—what drives the nightmares of wage-slaves mired in dead-end careers battling a loveless marriage—was a goldmine of mythical proportions for him. Frank was almost sad sometimes at just how lucky he was, as it removed all the challenge from life; made things almost boring.

Then there were the people who noticed he was just a little too lucky. They called him a cheater, or worse. His blessing eventually wore thin the nerves of the jealous and the petty, who fell for his easy glamour and charisma, but resented him for it. He figured that out, too, eventually.

That was the real reason they moved so often. He wanted novelty, to experience as much as possible before he moved on: leaving to dodge inevitable hard feelings from those he overshadowed.

And he made it a science. He kept a journal long ago, detailing his experiments like a chemistry lab-book—that he burned mere hours after the truth was obvious.

No, things didn't always go his way, but the likelihood of misfortune was astronomical, and anything to this degree was some deranged fantasy-world where up was down, black was white, and seven ate nine. His head spun, and not just because he was drunk. Samson dying like that was... impossible. He likened it to picking oranges in a beautiful orchard for decades, peeling one particularly hefty orange, and biting into a fresh, juicy, live grenade.

The only thing Frank could do, was lose himself in nostalgia for a while, embrace his past of misbegotten prosperity, and try to figure just where it went so horribly astray.

Had he used it all up: his luck? Was that even possible?