THUGLIT
Issue Fourteen
Edited by Todd Robinson
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in the works are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
THUGLIT: Issue Fourteen
ISBN-13:978-1503017399
ISBN-10:1503017397
Stories by the authors: ©Albert Tucher, ©S.A. Cosby, ©Craig McNeely, ©Eddie McNamara, ©Blair Kroeber, ©Neil Krolicki, ©Scott Loring Sanders. ©Dan J. Fiore
Published by THUGLIT Publishing.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the Author(s).
Table of Contents
A Message from Big Daddy Thug
Poachers by Neil Krolicki
Desperation by Albert Tucher
Authenti City by Eddie McNamara
Grandpa's Place by S.A. Cosby
Be My Alibi by Blair Kroeber
Assisted Living by CT McNeely
Shooting Creek by Scott Loring Sanders
Heart by Dan J. Fiore
Author Bios
A Message from Big Daddy Thug
Welcome back, Thugketeers.
Got something special for you…
Don't give me that look. My hands are nowhere near my pants.
A couple months back, LitReactor hit us with the idea to run a writing competition, with the winners to be featured in the magazine. Dozens submitted, many were worthy, only three made the cut.
It was rough, it was tumble, but starting here (and continuing over the next two issues) those stories that survived the knock-down-drag-out donnybrook of a writing competition will be featured in these pages.
The first featured story from the LitReactor ARREST US Challenge IS…
…I'm not telling ya.
Does it matter? It's freaking great, but so are all of our stories. So, just read 'em all and enjoy.
And congratulations to our first featured story from You-Know-Who-You-Are.
Tee-hee.
I'm such a dick.
(Go to the last page, if you want to know ahead of time)
IN THIS ISSUE OF THUGLIT:
Double your money, double your crosses.
It wasn't me.
WASSAMATTAYOO?
Puff, puff, pass……out.
Diana Andrews makes her way back to Thuglit.
My heeeart wiiiill go ooooon! (shut up)
Don't underestimate the power of pity.
Horseshoes and hand grenades. Sometimes the hand grenade is more merciful.
SEE YOU IN 60, FUCKOS!!!
Todd Robinson (Big Daddy Thug)
10/30/14
Poachers
by Neil Krolicki
King Kush is already slumped over the keypad drooling little red icebergs of broken teeth. His eyes are blueberry bagels from the hammering we've been tossing him tonight, but Jeremy still pulls out the torch. The cute kitchen variety that, up until right now, has only been used to brown up sugary crusts on Jeremy's homemade creme brûlées. Make golden meringue peaks. The only skin it's roasted has been on red peppers.
Even my dumb brain, dissolving inside my skull this very second, knows this is too far. Still thinks: C'mon, man. He's stomped, we don't have to crisp him up for a disarm code. Just give him a sec, but brain doesn't say crap. Don't know if it even can, at this point. Form words. Just keep the business end of my machete fixed between those puffy eyes, that's my part now. Center, man. Center. Look hard and don't flip your shit.
Trying to spark the torch, Jeremy's voice is garbled from behind the plastic mask. "If you want uglier, man, I can do ugly. Hit that goddamn code!"
Flick. Flick. King Kush holds up his zip-tied hands, huffing. Through his busted lips it sounds like he's saying 'relax.' The torch's hiss of butane finally sucks in the spark, making a sharp blue blade of fire in a quick puff, and Jeremy drops back, smacking at his arms and chest. He pulls at the mask, making sure the fake plastic face didn't just get welded to his for real face.
"Ugly it is, jerkoff!"
The sweat's building up behind my own mask, sucking the plastic harder to my cheeks every time I try to pull a breath in through the thin mouth slit. They looked cool in the Halloween supply store. Now though, the face on top of my face is suffocating the crap out of me. The mold of the forever smiling woman painted with heavy eye makeup and rosy cheeks. Just a thin layer of plastic, but strapped over your skin it becomes trippy as all hell.
Creeping numbness that started back in King Kush's closet/pharmacy is seeping further down my arms. Slithering down the backs of my legs. I'm a tiny human being safe in the skull of this gigantic meat machine. A tiny pilot locked up in the mission control of my hollowed-out skull—pulling the levers and stepping on the pedals that swing the meat hands, make me look human. But I'm floating further away from the wheel. Sliding into the passenger seat a little bit at a time. Wondering if I can even...
Jeremy's knuckles smack upside my jaw, shaking my teeth and I'm back on Earth for a second. Semi-centered. I jerk the machete that's drifted down to my side back up into King Kush's face, everyone snapping back a little.
"Focus up, jackass!" Jeremy says.
King Kush taps in the entry code on the greenhouse keypad woodpecker-quick when Jeremy holds the barrel of the torch to his neck, the stink of singed hair and charbroiled chicken skin as Jeremy holds a gloved hand over the guy's screaming mouth.
"Outstanding job, cupcake!"
Inside the greenhouse it's San Diego in July. Miami in March. A perfect seventy-six degrees. Relative humidity, I'd call it forty percent. A tennis court-sized layout of tippy-top deep-water culturing gear, thick with crops. It's my farm. Almost exactly. Just like the grow space in my basement, but times ten or fifty or whatever.
My skull cockpit sends word to the wobbling meat hand to tighten up on the machete, not to drop it goddamit. Meat hand radios back in the affirmative and the machete straightens. I'm telling my brain to anchor.
Booting His Highness to the concrete floor, Jeremy walks the rows of stalks, tickling the leaves.
"Fuuuuuuuuck yes, dude!"
What I can see, but can't feel are flittering specks drifting down onto me like black snowflakes. A cloud of dark flecks, floating and settling everywhere. I don't ask Jeremy if he sees them too.
Alright, pop quiz! The Donkey Kong barrels chained to the ceiling, you see them? What are they? C'mon you know this.
Behind the frozen expression on the plastic mask, -behind my twitching for-real-face, I'm holding class inside my liquefying grey matter. Passing out tests. Drilling the skull pilot to distract him. Keep him on earth.
The Donkey Kong barrels are CAN .38 Special air filters. Jam-packed with activated carbon to filter out the slightest hint of anything organic.
A-plus, skull pilot. A-plus. What else? Tell me more.
The cool breeze is exhaust fans pushing eight hundred cubic feet per minute of oxygen, the rumbling we're all screaming over to hear each other. Circulating fingers of air through the stalks of—most likely—a head-buzzing sativa. All propped through the scrog netting that keeps these bitches from falling onto one another like blasted sorority girls.
What season is it right now?
These ladies look young, maybe two weeks into flowering. Whi
ch would mean summer. Eighteen hours of digitally timed light. In three more weeks, King Kush will tell these girls it's fall and the hours of daylight will drop down to just twelve. Oh, I'm saying 'girls' and 'ladies' because any weed that gets you high, it's always female.
All the thick cables Jeremy's having to walk around, what're those?
That's all two-twenty volt ballast cables snaking along the floor. What you'd plug your washing machine into, not your toaster. This is sloppy, they should be bolted up on the wall. At home, our electric bill tripled when I had our grow room wired for two-twenty. Before Amendment 64 passed, you'd tell the electrician you were just installing a kiln for your pottery or a tanning bed, a hot tub. Before growing was legal, your electrician would just roll his eyes and say 'Sure buddy, whatever.'
Two-twenty's a must for the high-pressure sodium bulbs rigged to the ceiling with heavy duty straps, sealed up snug, but vented. King Kush did this up right. This is top grade material. Imported.
And you're sure about that?
I run the same gear at home. The dumpy tri-level I rent out with Jeremy. You can pick up some flimsy shit from the local grow store, if you cultivate your cheeba like Mexican brick weed.
Jeremy's grabbing the stalk bases and yanking the root balls out of the tops of the reservoirs. If one doesn't give right off, he's kicking the lid until it busts, sending cracks down the side of the whole tank. Gushes of nutrient-rich water flood the floor where King Kush is covering his face, the water turning pink after it washes over him.
Jeremy says to me "Get to it, shit for brains."
I've been to outer space. A hundred miles up. I'm talking mega-high. Over-baked. Ultra-faded. I've gone doughy and dead-brained for a spell, but this isn't that. This is me swimming in the stardust of the crab nebula, man. Gonzo supremeo. That sounds about right.
The meat hands keep moving though, executing marching orders from the skull pilot, still on Earth. Gathering up the torn out plants into a black trash bag, shaking solution water out of the root masses. It's a pretty sound imitation of a human. I'm ignoring the flittering specks of ash still touching down all over me. Playing professor to myself, occupying the skull pilot, I keep the questions coming.
I tell me to go on.
My first grow set-up used the opaque black barrels from the hardware store to house the growing medium. Rook move. More containers, you find out, means more scrubbing. More of you in thick elbow-length gloves hunched over a mud sink with thirty-three percent, restaurant grade, peroxide at the end of every harvest season. Trying to chisel out the nutrient deposits, thick as barnacles.
You want to streamline. Opt for the single forty-gallon plastic reservoirs that makes it wicked simpler to keep your pH balance in that 6.5 sweet spot. Not too acidic. Not too base. The single tub that suspends the net pots in one bath of nutrient solution while your pond pump circulates and the air stones bubble through the roots nested in compressed clay pebbles. That's what King Kush has done in here, it's just more on a 'warehouse' scale, not 'run-down basement' scale.
Tonight, tell me—how was it supposed to go?
Last night, I was tending my own crops, Jeremy trailed me with a plate hovering under his mouth. Chowing on phyllo dough puffs stuffed with baby bella mushrooms and Italian sausage. Hitting off his joint in between noshing. When he's high, it can never just be pizza pockets, microwaved hot dogs smothered in canned chili, or gummy bears. Smoked up, he turns into Anthony goddamn Bourdain. The Stoner Gourmet.
I gauged the water level on my reservoir, checked the parts-per-million, mouthing along as Jeremy did another lap around the plan. He was reminding himself as much as me. He'd been casually hanging back in his shitbox Tercel all week while King Kush floated between his three dispensaries in the city. Come to King Kush—buy 9 pre-rolls and the 10th is always free! If you find a better deal...SMOKE ITTTT! Jeremy mapped out the grounds of his house in the north metro burbs. That's where we'd rush him.
Then Jeremy stubbed the ass end of his burning joint hard into the folds of my neck with his thumb. Next to the pencil eraser sized scars from the three times he's done this before. Ah, brotherly love. He asked if I was paying fucking attention and rubbing at the burn I said yes, goddamn, yes.
He floated a puff into my mouth and I wolfed it down in two bites. I'm a battered wife. A taste of his cooking and I'm starting to apologize for him. Sure, he hits me, but have you had his lamb meatballs with harissa?
Swishing some pH down in a cylinder, I heard the plate of munchies break against the basement floor and Jeremy was doing his hard stare into nothingness—intently picking apart the golden lights in our grow room without a blink, his hands dead at his sides.
I watched the tips of Jeremy's index fingers for tremors, myoclonic jerks. Like all the times before, that'd be the starting gun for me to stick couch cushions under him and clear away anything that he can bang into if he goes total fish-out-of-water. His 'trout dance.' What I call it, but never to his face.
I prayed that zoning out for a spell might be as bad as it got with him wasted. Might not have to review his med bracelet for a refresher on whether I'm supposed to lean him on his side after the seizure or not. Can never remember that. Right then, his fingers were still.
I slipped the dope scope into my eye and leaned down to inspect one of the taller buds, a jeweler squinting over green emeralds. Still way too early. The trichome caps that bubble up are limp and still icicle clear. You want these microscopic fingers at full attention, first boner of the morning straight and milky. That's when your harvest window opens. You want to be trimmed down and curing within seventy two hours if you don't want bud that'll take you to Coma-town for the afternoon. Yes, I said 'curing' not 'drying'. Think Cuban cigars. Saffron. These ladies aren't your corsage from homecoming.
Resuming his regularly scheduled programming, Jeremy pulled off his t-shirt and cranked his head hard to his shoulders till he heard the bones crack.
He said 'Dude, did you bust one of my Farberware plates? You're buying me another one outta your share."
As if I hadn't given him the speech on vegetative stage to flowering stage a gazillion times, he asked me if he could finally smoke these whores. Dragging the sharpening stone against the blade of the harvesting machete, he asked if he can chop these sluts down now, for the love of god.
You can't rush the zenith. When the rubber gloves go on and I manicure away all the sun leaves and garbage green to get to the sticky Cola—gorgeous Trichomes. For you down home stoners, these are your Dank Nugs. Chronic nuggets. Donkey dicks.
Right now, in the greenhouse, Jeremy's says "This puts your set up to fuckin' shame, bro."
Our whole crop sells out to our regulars. Our farm pays the rent. Utilities. Buys Jeremy fun kitchen toys. About all a ten-by-ten grow situation can give you in a year. You want a higher yield, you need bigger grow space. Need to rent a bigger house. This all means more cash. Thinking out loud one night, super blasted, I said, "We should fucking roll one of these big dispensary guys." A seed that grabbed hold and flowered in Jeremy's glitchy brain.
Hindsight being 20-20 though, details should have been hashed out. Better weapon choices made. More choreography established. Executing the 'rush the garage when he pulls in' part of the plan tonight, we almost stabbed each other moshing to get around the Audi, flanking King Kush a breath after he tapped out the disarm code on his alarm.
A girly squeal pressed out of his lungs when we tackled the guy, dropping elbows and knife butts in his general face/neck region. He flapped his stringy limbs at us from the garage floor, busting his Cartier watch, splitting the seams on his too-tight leather pants trying to buck me off. Two hundred and sixty pound me. It was cute. His eyes were all pupils. Too wide and darty. Our pal was straight E-tarded. Whatever soiree he just came from, the party favors were Molly. Bummer drug when you're getting your ass jumped. A lightning storm in his nerve endings echoing every punch to the base of his spine.
When we pulled him upright, h
is nose gushed down the front of the billowy number he was sporting. I cinched the zip ties around his wrists in front of him. To see King Kush on the street, what with his gold fingernails and overall fashion sense, you wouldn't know if he ran Mary Jane dispensaries or if he was headed to a club for pirates and animal print fans.
His sloppy lips said "Is this for real? Are you guys for real?"
Inside, Jeremy strung him by his frosted hair from room to tastefully decorated room, doing the ask-and-bash tour.
"You got a safe?"
Bash.
"A floor safe?"
Bash.
"Where you keep your money?"
Bash.
For sure there were little cameras recording each second of this torture parade, but they'd only be recording warped plastic faces poking from black hoodies you could buy at any Wal-Mart. We were sure to pick somebody with money, but not '24 hour bodyguard' money. Describing Jeremy to the cops later, King Kush might call him 'athletic'. I'll probably get called 'husky' or if he's a real dick 'obese.'
The tennis court of crops in the greenhouse—Jeremy's plucked almost all of them out by now, my slow ass behind on bagging duty.
Busy retracing steps, skull pilot stays grounded and I still have the controls. The flecks of ash still surge all around me. Maybe they're less black and more red. I hold up my palm to catch them and another smack rattles my jaw.
"Are you frickin' kidding me right now, man?"
Earlier, King Kush's ascot was soaked red when he finally led us to the hidey hole in his walk-in closet, behind the racks lined with more leopard and zebra numbers. More shoes than a dude needs. When he finally popped the safe in the wall (after a couple more raps on the noggin' with Jeremy's meat tenderizer), it was flush with stacks of hundreds.
THUGLIT Issue Fourteen Page 1