THUGLIT Issue One Read Online Free PDF Page A

shattered bone slide around. She tasted blood, opened her mouth. The blood squirted out.
    “Fucking bitch!”
    Turning Brandy over, her gold chain fell from her cleavage. She started crying.
    “Oh my god! I’m so sorry! I thought you stole it!”
    She gargled on the blood, spilled it from her mouth, “Please! I didn’t know! Oh my god! I’m so sorry!”
    He hammer-fisted her face.
    Why would no one help her, she wondered? Where were all the good Samaritans, the cops to her rescue? Her eyes swelled shut.
    The last thing she saw before her eyes closed was the young hipster artist drinking from his cup of Starbucks.
    Finally, her knight in shining armor had arrived.
    “Not my problem,” the kid hurried past.
    Across the street, the Mark s, the Eric a s, were taping her murder on their cell phones.
    Her forehead, swollen and gigantic, looked ready to burst.
    Her eyes: puffy, blood-filled black sacks.
    “Fucking bitch!”
    Angel stomped on her stomach. He jumped up, down on her stomach.
    He jumped up and down on her chest, missed, and almost fell over.
    Kicking her in the head, her neck snapped.
    Then he jumped up, stomped on her face, and her nose crunched into her face. The kids across the street gasped, but kept taping.
     
    *****
     
    Angel held the gold chains up to the sun.
    The gold glinted in the sunlight, and Brandy’s chain caught his eye.
    From his doorway, Momma Rodriguez waved to him: the run-down, Spanish colonial revival.
    It was midway along the broken street, the cracked sidewalks. Worn concrete the city of Phoenix had neglect ed fixing, or had forgotten all together to fix.
    The little hovel, where they eked out their living.
    Same as the rest of the dirt-poor residents of Garfield district, the ones lucky still to have homes.
    He thought on the little ratty crack girl; her homeless family…
    …fuck them!
    bitch he'd stomped in…
    …fuck them!
    On beating that uppity bitch to death, he felt some remorse. The cell phone tapings would likely catch up with him, he realized.
    He regretted that most.
    Not that any of those kids cared, really. So why should he?
    Because apathy was the new America .
    The day still brutally hot, the sky still laden with hazy green smog. He saw pigeons, and doves, and sparrows; the ugly and obnoxious black great-tailed grackles. They soared gracefully in the sky.
    A few blocks over, he heard the sirens of all the police cars, and all the ambulances, and the fire trucks still cleaning the bodies—the mess—of Lauro, the murdered kids.
    “Is this the motherfucker right here?”
    He felt the gun at his head.
    Miss Padilla and her boyfriend stepped from the shadows of another abandoned house.
    So fast, Angel didn’t have time to notice them before it was too late and her boyfriend was behind Angel, pointing the gun.
    “That’s him,” Miss Padilla said, “Fuckin’ no good rotten kid.”
    From their doorway, Momma Rodriguez waved.
    Looking to the sky, Angel saw the sun, the birds in the sky.
    The boyfriend flashed a mouth full of gold, “Take back what’s yours,” he said.
    Miss Padilla smiled, satisfied.
    Then she snatched back the gold chains from Angel’s hand.
    He looked in his palm before the gun took his life, and he was holding Brandy’s thin gold chain, the one she had hoped to pass to her daughter someday.

 
 
 
The Gleaner's Union
    b y Court Merrigan
     
     
     
     
    I come home from the Gleaner’s Union hangdog with a corn whiskey stumble in my step, trying not to believe what the boys was saying. How a man didn’t hardly have a choice no more. How he had to hire out. The boys who still came in to the Union, they was stalwart, they knew good as me the difference between laboring for wages and working your own land. But young ones can’t eat your knowing all winter, can they?
    Cora sat by the stove, skinning spuds.
    “How you been, little girl?” I said to her. “You go out walking today?”
    “Yeah,” she said.
    She looked up from that