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……………🎧: BoyWithUke - Toxic………………

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It was a life that was ordinary if you called it ordinary, and monotonous if you called it monotonous.

Crammed in a warehouse with friends or other punks, popping beer cans, cigarette packs rolling around, stealing a car for a drive when bored. There were few friends he truly cared about.

When even that got boring, he’d take a few girls to a motel and mess around. It wasn't hard.

If the man he called his father found out, he’d fly into a rage again, but Ethan didn't give a damn. When he returned home after staying out, he was usually greeted by kicks or the dull sound of impact. The man called his father would beat him out of uncontrollable anger, and the woman called his mother would just quietly close her bedroom door. Acting as if the sound of her son being beaten was nothing more than noise. It was a scene as tiresome as it was familiar.

By the next morning, the man called his father would wash his hands and act as if nothing had happened. The time he spent forced to sit at the dining table, picking at frozen food or cereal, was the most agonizing. It was the time he had to listen to endless stories about when his father's business was successful—the 'glory days.' What was the point, when they were currently stuck in a neighborhood that was basically an Arizona slum? It was a repetition of such days.

He heard someone new had moved into the house across the street. He wasn't particularly interested. This was a neighborhood where people exchanged gunshots or insults instead of warm greetings. Since it was such a shitty area, the police wouldn't even come unless shots were fired.

Instead, he heard that the person who moved into the old house across the way was a bit peculiar. Usually, the people who come to this neighborhood fall into a few categories: so poor their shoe soles are tattered, failed in business—like someone he knew—or someone shady.

The person across the street didn't look dirt-poor. Nor did they seem like the failed-businessman type with uselessly high pride. They might be someone shady, though.

Except for the first day they moved in, no one had seen a glimpse of them. The curtains were always drawn, and they didn't loiter around like the usual thugs. In fact, they hardly went out at all. If it hadn't been for the incident a short while later, he might have just forgotten about them. Thinking they were just an eccentric—or the type to stay cooped up inside. But that incident a short while later left a massive crack in his life. One on the scale of a sinkhole.

Yeah, the kind of nonsensical situation where you almost get shanked by a criminal and then get saved by a vampire.

…And that vampire was the person who moved into the house across the street. The person living right across from him. Or rather, not a person?

….If there were a scriptwriter, he wanted to lodge a complaint. About why they wrote such an illogical story. Did vampires even exist in the first place? The kind that hates garlic, hates sunlight, and dies only if you drive a stake through their heart?

Why is there no Santa, but there are vampires? Isn't that destroying childhood innocence? Whatever the case, one thing was for sure: he was damn unlucky.