saddest vacant lot in all the world

The inside of the closet is small, and a concentrated stench hangs in the air.  It overwhelms Ethan’s senses with the taste of white vinegar sucked into the back of his throat through his slack-jawed mouth.  It’s from Ian’s shoes, his beloved  V ibram FiveFingers™ .  Long ago, they had been a bright orange, but now are the color of dark rust, rancid with mildew. “Ethan, that is you, isn’t it!” Ian said.  He scooched over on an unkempt twin mattress and slapped the space with his hand.  “Come on, buddy, take a seat.” There was a pause, and then Ethan answered, “Why are you wearing those in bed?” “It’s a sofa right now.” Ethan is vexed. “Then why are you wearing them on the sofa?” “I don’t go anywhere without them.” “But you haven’t gone anywhere.” “But I’ve come from somewhere.” Tears in Ethan’s eyes well up and start to drip down his cheeks.  They sting and blur his vision, making everything wobbly, adding to the confusion.  Why does Ian talk like...

Ethan flings the sliding closet door open as if he’s shoving a heavyset woman out of his way; it slams loudly and rattles in its track.  He’s through the opening, flying toward Ian like a raped ape, screaming in a high-pitched tenor that breaks into a shrill moan.  Above his head, his hands wield the bottle as a club.  Every tendon and ligament flexes and bulges under the tension of his grip, and Ethan swings it into Ian’s head. When the bottle comes down, the thickest part of it splits into the top of Ian’s skull with a sickening crack.  Another blow lands, and another one; the strikes begin deforming the bone.  Blood runs down his face, and his eyes roll back.  The blows keep landing until the skull gives way; the brain exposed through the split skin spills out onto the sheets.  There’s a sucking pop as Ethan dislodges the bottle from the gore with each strike.  He goes until the whole top of Ian’s head has been pounded down into the jawline; no...

From the moment Ethan’s flight landed at Logan International Airport, it was clear that, had he found himself before a Suffolk County judge, he wouldn’t have been able to give an account of his actions or, more importantly, his intentions.  In that same sloshed fugue state, he made his way down the South Shore to Carver, to the house where he would find Ian. . . . Ethan pulls from his coat the bottle of alcohol he’d purchased fifteen minutes before at the store, and from his back pocket produces a non-slip rubber jar opener.  Around him snow silently falls;  the flakes instantly melting against his warm, liquored face.  Any tracks he’d left are already covered.  In every direction, the ground is indistinguishable.  He cannot turn back now. “A good day,” he says, joining the twist-off bottle cap to the rubber jar opener.  There is a slight hiss.  “To IPA.” He draws the opening of the bottle to his mouth and begins to slug down the booze in one prol...

     Ethan begins to speak, “These silly people, they believe in sky daddies and fairy tales, the things that have no proof or measure: how dare they offend my modern intellectual sensibilities!  Such sensibilities are derived from fact, can be replicated, and will be studied relentlessly; in science, we even leave room for our positions to be readjusted!  Over two thousand years spent at worship, and those charlatans haven’t updated the Bible once.  This makes me wonder – what does Bible study even mean?        “Harumph!      “The worst of them is Ian.  He must have something to do with this; he is always out to get me.  It would be in his best interest to see me utterly crestfallen. I will not allow it!  In fact, I could practically hear the smile stretch across his face during my tribulation, and it irks me to admit I was truly grieved.  How could I not be?      “Should there be a...

               The Clint-shaped hole in Ethan’s heart has been filled with a highly developed interest in a grey monoculture: an autocratic worldview where the pluralities of good versus evil have been stripped away to protagonist versus antagonist, where the structure of something is the ultimate truth and the very implication of an objective morality is devil-speak, whereupon such devil-speak causes him to recoil, shuffle through his notes to refute scripture that no one cited, and smile self-assuredly. But at this very moment, he makes an exodus from Traverse City, forsaken and malignant of heart, intent on doing harm unto Ian as a well-measured act of retribution that he sees now is far overdue.  To fund the trip, he had to pawn off the collectibles that were once to furnish the shag shack, which had become painful to look at in recent months.  The Gears of War Lancer was the most hurtsome. . . . “Dude, is that what I think it i...

               It is late, not so late that it’s early, but to be specific, it is just past midnight, and held in front of Ethan is a heavily marked-up and thumbed-through printout of Engel v. Vitale.  He’d been studying it relentlessly like some sort of manic gambler, scanning over a losing scratch ticket trying to square the circle and will the numbers into a winning alignment, but so far, he had no luck, and there’s been no luck for a while now. There had been an incident during movie night a number of weeks back.  As some sort of symbolic gesture, Ethan had begun to quietly boycott the Discord server until late one evening, when he gave it the dreaded French exit altogether.  October had come and gone before anyone had noticed his departure, and when someone did, theories were debated for all of an hour before it slipped from the server zeitgeist; there were far more important things to tend to, for instance, the upcoming 2...