Fraturday

by Tyger Schonholzer

After all that time, most people still didn’t know why it happened or exactly when it started.

There used to be Fridays and Saturdays, each consisting of twenty-four hours, some of them labor-intensive, others charged with high voltage fun. Nobody under twenty ever went home on a Friday night. And nobody under thirty had the desire to sleep.

Friday nights were for shaking off responsibilities, for acting foolishly. They were synonymous with diving head-first into crowds we would normally be smart enough to avoid, immersing ourselves in music we cared nothing for, and polluting ourselves with harmful but nevertheless deeply desired substances. After working all week, nobody held back.

Saturday mornings were for nursing hangovers and for trying to figure out who we were in bed with and why. Sometimes there were mysterious injuries, missing or damaged articles of clothing and of course no cash left in our wallets. Saturday mornings typically started somewhere around noon.

Perhaps it all went too far one day. Perhaps some sadistically twisted deity somewhere decided to shake things up a bit. Or perhaps it was the government or an invading alien species. At any rate, at some point in time, Saturday mornings ceased to exist.

At first, nobody noticed. We simply thought the night had grown longer. And boy did we party! The hangovers got worse, the bed-partners trashier and sometimes the aches and pains followed us halfway through the week.

Work became second priority. We still showed up; we needed our paychecks, but our work ethics began to slide. The bar owners caught on to our habits and opened earlier on Fridays, so we often left work by noon, returning only to clock out at quitting time.

We became so depraved, some of us felt the need to seek absolution for our sins. We began to miss our Saturday morning recuperation time. After the long night came Sunday and we showed up in church half-inebriated.

The old-timers, the ones who no longer had the will to party, squared their jaws when they saw us and refused to sit anywhere near us. We knew we reeked of sex, smoke and alcohol, but we suspected that there was more to their hostility than mere revulsion.

They called us the Fraturday People and one day, old lady Brannigan told us the truth.

“Your fault!” she chided. “You changed everything with all that drinking and whoring you do! Now the world is twisted and we don’t know how to straighten it out.”

Old lady Brannigan didn’t mince words. At first, we didn’t believe her, but the evidence was too incriminating. “Read the newspapers,” she demanded. “Nothing but corruption and crime anymore. Have you any idea how much trouble you caused?”

She was right. Two independent days, each of them with its own name, its own purpose, and its own promises and opportunities, had become just one long and terrible worm of a night, thirty-six hours of darkness, to be exact, riddled with delinquency, filth, and domestic violence. Friday night had taken over, had devoured first the morning and then the whole rest of the new day. Like a parasite spreading its overindulgence across time, it robbed the world of daylight.

We felt dreadful, each of us, mortified in our guilt-ridden hearts. We tried to repent, but it was difficult. Our fragmented minds derailed easily and couldn’t maintain a coherent thought.

We even blamed one another in an effort to whitewash ourselves and shuck responsibility. “Look what you did!” became our most commonly uttered accusation. And “It wasn’t me!” our most frequent retort.

Nothing we did brought the world back to order. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t finger-point our way back to normalcy. It was out of our hands. One day, weary of the struggle, as if by agreement, we all quit church and headed back to the club.

Our stirrings of self-reproach we silenced with pills and whiskey. Generous with our money, we bought round after round. We danced. And we coupled. We stayed all night. Why shouldn’t we? After all, it was Fraturday!