Free THUGLIT Issue Two by Justin Porter, Buster Willoughby, Katherine Tomlinson, Mike MacLean, Patrick J. Lambe, Mark E. Fitch, Nik Korpon, Jen Conley

throat. He’d come with an animal grunt he hadn’t bothered to disguise.
    She emerged from beneath to the table to knowing looks and amused glances from the diners seated nearby.
    After, he made her eat everything on her plate before pulling out his wallet and coun ting out five crisp one-hundred- dollar bills.
    She’d been dismayed by how little he was offering. Her phone bill alone had rolled three times and was nearly four hundred dollars. If her service was cut off, she’d have to pay the bill in full, pay a re-connection charge, and also put down a deposit of $200 so the phone company could “secure” her account.
    “Thank you Barton,” she had said and reached for the money.
    “This is a one-time thing,” he said. “Don’t call me again.”
    He received a text just then, and as he answered it, she gathered up her things.
    He looked up as she stood.
    “Sorry,” he said. “That was my travel agent. I’m taking Laura to Venice next month for her birthday. It’s going to be a surprise.”
    She was outside the restaurant before the first tear spilled. That was good because she hadn’t given Barton the satisfaction of seeing her cry, but it was bad because everyone on the sidewalk could see the snot running from her nose and her mascara streaking because she didn’t have a tissue and she didn’t want to wipe her face on the sleeve of her suit jacket.
    The suit was the last one she owned that still almost fit her, and she needed it for those times when she needed to camouflage herself as a normal person.
    She mostly wore jeans and t-shirts at the campaign headquarters, cinching the jeans tight on her thin frame with a braided leather belt her niece had made at camp.
    The leather belt had been a consolation prize.
    Nora had asked her sister if she could lend her the money to fix her car’s transmission and her sister had hemmed and hawed and explained that after paying for camp and music lessons and riding lessons for her daughter, she didn’t have any cash to spare.
    Nora had been furious with her sister and when the belt arrived in the mail with a chirpy note from her niece, a message that basically said, “I’m having a great time, sorry your life sucks,” Nora had considered just tossing it. But her days of throwing anything away were over, so she’d kept the belt.
    When Nora heard that the candidate was going to visit his local campaign headquarters, it was exciting news. She wanted to ask him about the job creation plans he’d promised but hadn’t yet delivered on.
    The night before the event, she hand-washed a white silk blouse and made a little red, white, and blue ribbon rosette to pin on the lapel of the red suit jacket.
    She took extra care to wash and style her hair.
    She polished a pair of Anne Klein pumps she used to wear to work, the only pair she hadn’t sold on eBay when it became clear that she was long-term, hard-core unemployable, and if she ever did get another job it would be the kind where a uniform was supplied to the employees.
    The suit skirt was loose in the waist, but Nora fixed that with a safety pin.
    With the white silk shell over the waistband, you couldn’t even tell.
    “Lookin’ good Nora,” Lowell had said to her approvingly when she arrived the next day. “You clean up nice.”
    Lowell was a kind man in his seventie s who came in to the office a couple times a week to work the phone banks on the candidate’s behalf. He’d told Nora that he wasn’t really a political man but that he needed something to distract him from the pain of losing his long-time partner to prostate cancer.
    Lowell had been her Secret Santa at Christmas. They were supposed to stick to presents that cost less than $10 but he had given her a $100 supermarket gift certificate and a card that s aid, “It’s our little secret.” She’d recognized his shaky, old man handwriting.
    She almost cried when she read the message, and to cover up she made up a story that the gift card was for a