Blood on the Canvas

In the rust-belt town of Bellfield, eighteen-year-old Caleb Thorne enters a savage underground boxing circuit to pay for his sister's life-saving dialysis. Each fight is a macabre theater for the wealthy, who wager fortunes on knockout blows and death counts. When Caleb discovers a cellphone recording of a fight promoter ordering a boxer's execution to settle a debt, he believes he holds the key to justice. But as the evidence journeys through a corrupted court system, every official hears something different: the prosecution hears hearsay, the judge hears irrelevant noise, and the jury hears what they are told to hear. Channeling Richard Wright's brutal naturalism, this is a story of how physical violence mirrors the legal violence inflicted on the powerless, where the truth is not determined by what a recording says, but by the deafness of those privileged enough to interpret it.