Following the success of the Mondays Are Murder series, Akashic introduces Thursdaze (because the weekend won’t come fast enough), modeled after our highly addictive Akashic Drug Chronicles Series—which has produced volumes on marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and speed. Stories in Thursdaze, as in the printed anthologies, encapsulate the writer’s fictional experience with marijuana, speed, heroin, cocaine, or any other drug, real or imagined, controlled or prescribed, illegal or soon-to-be legalized. Like Mondays Are Murder, stories in this series must adhere to a 750-word limit. There is an emphasis placed on stories that stylistically emulate the drug of choice, allowing readers to indulge risk-free. Thursdaze is your fiction fix to help you power through to the weekend.
A typical Thursday. A typical night.
Jerry stretched his feet under the dining table, yawning. His eleventh grade math homework seemed to glare at him from the fluorescent white of the overhead light. They were covering probability in class, something Jerry knew plenty about.
There was a thump above him.
Typical Thursday night . . .
“You need to build your confidence,” he says. “You need to build your self-esteem. You need to build a @better-you. For a @better-us #selfie-rule . . .”
I didn’t notice I had nodded out on the train and had missed my stop until the conductor clamped down on my bony shoulders in Wellington, saying, “Come on, honey . . .”
The sun faded on Paris as I headed to the 5th arrondissement on the 63 bus. I slipped in the back door, as drivers didn’t bother policing fares. My free ride took me over the Seine, to the Left Bank along Boulevard Saint Germaine and dropped me near Luxembourg Gardens. Down Rue Saint Jacques on foot, passed La Sorbonne, Le Pantheon, and finally onto the stool of a bar run by Aussies . . .
Mom steps away from the CD player and as the music spins to life I think: Oh fuck me, please no. It’s Michael Bolton’s cover of “When a Man Loves a Woman,” from the world’s most undeserving greatest hits collection . . .
The cop’s fingers were as thick as the sausages he stabbed with the fork and stuffed in his mouth. Probably as greasy, too, Tual thought as he drank coffee in a booth. He watched the cop sitting at the counter . . .
When Cold-bone described beating his girlfriend unconscious because she threw up on his shoes while giving him a blowjob, Burnadette decided that she wasn’t hungry after all . . .
The train lurched forward like a giant hiccup. Holiday awoke from his hiatus, opening his eyes just enough to make out light and dark shapes. You coulda blindfolded him with dental floss . . .