“By 7am the Room Was Ready” by Cristian Flores Garcia
I met her at work. I was five years younger than her, and shy. She always smiled, was loud and outspoken . . .
Category: Thursdaze
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.
“Mr. Acid” by Richard Jay Goldstein
Which reminds you of the first time you ever dropped acid.
Hardly anyone then had ever heard of LSD. But rumors dawned of a great new drug which let you see God, or someone similar. Apocryphal stories drifted like alien blimps through misty skies. How LSD had been discovered by an atheist Swiss chemist who got some on his hands and became a holy man. How Aldous Huxley had taken tons of it and left his dying body behind, rising like a comet into heaven . . .
“Glitterless Game-town” by Timber Masterson
You tell yourself you have a handle on it, that it’s not so bad. You catch yourself looking down at that once-precious, bleeding, now-scarring arm—blisters reddening, rotting boughs hemorrhaging, far from on the mend, things swelling where they shouldn’t. And those twitches you have . . .
“Suicide Note #3” by David L. Robb
I shouldn’t have dropped acid today. But then, that’s what I always say. I live on the third floor of the Mars Motel in Yuba City. If you lived in the Mars Motel in Yuba City, you’d drop acid, too. But this time is different . . .
“Counting Backwards” by Caroline Bock
10. If you can count backwards from 10, you are not drunk . . .
“MegaBlast” by R.K. Solomon
I’m not a complete monster. It pains me to hear her beg for her life. She says she’s got two kids. Little kids. A boy and a girl. Maybe she does. Maybe not. People will say anything in these situations. I wish she’d shut up. This is hard enough without the hysterics . . .
“The Eternally Lit” by Joseph G. Peterson
You had seen once long ago when you were an eighth grader the JFK Eternal Flame at Arlington National Cemetery and you marveled at the idea that a flame might flicker eternally . . .
“No Doors” by Lisa Martens
When I was eight years old, I was diagnosed with epilepsy. The Dallas school district saw I was brown, so they stuck me in ESL classes with the other brown children.
The actual problem was that I was having over a hundred minor seizures per day . . .