Free THUGLIT Issue Twelve by Leon Marks, Rob Hart, Justin Porter, Mike Miner, Edward Hagelstein, Kevin Garvey, T. Maxim Simmler, J.J. Sinisi Page B

outward from your heart to your extremities, your brain, your dreams. You enter a new body, one that will transport you to your seat next to The Lord. You don't want to sing and dance. You want to sleep, or at least rest, because you understand that peace is all that's left for you.
    I hear the click from below. It's followed by three more, with no pattern or rhythm. Four clicks total, all from different directions. Like a baby bird peeking from the nest, I spot a dark blue uniform in the haze. To the far right I find another. They're wearing thick protective vests and boots like mine. One of the officers shouts something, but to me, it's muffled. I've already entered the dream, where He is honoring me. Another muffled shout. They're calling me. Commanding me to do something, but they sound farther away with each word. Two more clicks with two more arrivals. More shouting. They think I am the evil one.
    Look kindly upon them. They can't help their blindness. They will say that I went crazy. They'll need to believe that. Only then can the doctor's wife, the skateboarder's mother, the guitarist's grandchildren accept it. It's too agonizing to blame themselves. They've dispensed with moral laws, so all that's left is madness. Madness brings comfort, so I must be mad for them. That will be my gift.
    I grasp the han d of The Lord, and He leads me. We place the muzzle in my mouth and I can taste the steel. We place my fingers on the trigger guard. More muffled calls from below. They don't want me to go. Of course not. I am the truth. We rest my forefinger on the trigger, and with a breeze, like a hand stroking my head, we leave my body behind.

The Hard Sell
    by J. J. Sinisi
     
     
     
     
    Dead light bulbs in The Starry Nite Motel 's welcome sign hid behind the foggy Kansas evening until the entirety of the lit portion read simply: Wel . I thought about that irony as our van slowed to enter. Certainly I wasn't Wel , or well, whichever was more appropriate, but our destination would provide me little opportunity to change that. Just then, the motel's roof swallowed the smoldering sunset. That seemed more fitting, given its place in local lore and apocrypha.
    My seat hopped as the van cleared the second speed bump. After pulling into one of many vacant spots in front of the manager 's office, our leader as it were, Connie Mercant, descended from the driver's seat using the kick plate to negotiate his way to the gravel-strewn lot. His small feet landed with a scrape and his short legs escorted him through the front door. With what little humor I had left, I noticed the strip of measurements taped to the doorframe he entered—a tool for witnesses to easily identify at least one trait of a shoplifter, and of course, a definitive sign that the establishment is surely a place your mother told you never to visit. Connie's head just missed the five-foot mark.
    " So what room did the murder happen in?" Tate Durbin asked from the shotgun seat, the euphemism's irony also not lost on me.
    " Murders."
    " What?"
    " Murders," I repeated. "Seven people. Plural."
    " Alright fine. Murders. In what room did the murders happen?"
    " It wasn't just one room. I heard it was at least three."
    Sick. That was the word he used then. Sick, as in, murderers are so deranged they are mentally ill. But while he said it, Tate Durbin smiled as he stared out the window at the growing vapor.
    It occurred to me then, like some specter through the fog, Tate did indeed believe the act of murdering seven people was sick. But he meant it in the new colloquial. He meant the word 'sick' the way the people of my generation meant the word 'cool.' At that moment, I felt both divorced from my agreement with these two men but also wedded to my final decision. Much as the term cool typified the sixties but held over to the seventies when I grew up, the term sick was born in the last generation but gained prominence beneath the wires of modern communication and electronica.
    My