One of Our Thursdays Is Missing Read Online Free Page A

last time. She didn’t do justice to my dynamic personalty and poetic sensibilities. Played it all a bit . . . fishcentric, if you know what I mean.”
    “I’ll do my best,” I said, making a mental note to definitely rebook the penguin.
    “Good,” said Pickwick. “Have you the paper?”
    We returned to the kitchen, and I found The Word for her.
    “Hmm,” she said thoughtfully, staring at the City pages. “Metaphor has risen by seventeen pounds a barrel. I should dump some metonym and buy into synecdoche futures.”
    “How are things going with Racy Novel?” I asked, since the political problems up in the North had been much in the news recently. A long-running dispute between Racy Novel, Women’s Fiction and Dogma had been getting worse and was threatening to erupt into a genre war at the drop of a hat.
    “Peace talks still on schedule for Friday,” replied Pickwick, “as if that will do any good. Sometimes I think that Muffler nutjob wants nothing but a good scrap. By the way,” she added, “did you hear about Raphael’s Walrus ?”
    “No.”
    “Got their eviction papers this morning.”
    This wasn’t surprising. Raphael’s Walrus was a book six doors down that hadn’t been read for a while. I didn’t know them well, but since we were located at the Speculative end of Fantasy, the real estate was valuable. We’d have a new neighbor almost the moment they left.
    “I hope it’s not Sword and Sorcery,” said Pickwick with a shudder. “Goblins really drag down the neighborhood.”
    “Goblins might say the same about dodos.”
    “Impossible!” she retorted. “Dodos are cute and cuddly and lovable and . . . don’t steal stuff and spread disease.”
    People often wondered why my written dodo was such a pain in the ass when the real Pickwick was so cute. The reason was simple: lack of choice. There are only three dodos in fiction. One was dangerously psychotic, the second was something big over in Natural History, which left only one: The dodo from Alice is the same bespectacled know-it-all in my series. Her name wasn’t actually Pickwick—it was Lorina Peabody III, but we called her Pickwick, and she didn’t much mind either way. She put down the paper, announced to the room that she would be taking her siesta and waddled off.
    “Mrs. Malaprop,” I said once Pickwick had left, “are you still attending your therapy sessions?”
    Mrs. Malaprop arched a highbrow. She knew well enough who had complained about her.
    “Eggs tincture is too good for that burred,” she said in a crabby tone, “but isle do as Uri quest.”
    The average working life of a Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals was barely fifty readings. The unrelenting comedic misuse of words eventually caused them to suffer postsyntax stress disorder, and once their speech became irreversibly abstruse, they were simply replaced. Most “retired” Mrs. Malaprops were released into the BookWorld, where they turned ferrule, but just recently rehoming charities were taking note of their plight. After they’d undergone intensive Holorime Bombardment Therapy to enable them to at least sound right even if they didn’t read right, people like me offered them a home and a job. Our Malaprop was an early model—Number 862, to be precise—and she was generally quite helpful if a little tricky to understand. There was talk of using Dogberry stem cells to cure her, but we didn’t hold our broth.
    I stared at the diagnostics board that covered one wall of the kitchen. The number of readers on the Read-O-Meter was stuck firmly at zero, with thirty-two copies of my novels listed “bookmarked and pending.” Of these, eighteen were active/ resting between reads. The rest were probably lying under a stack of other unfinished books. I checked the RealWorld clock. It was 0842. Years ago I was read on the train, but that hadn’t happened for a while. Unreadfulness was a double-edged sword. More leisure time, but a distinct loss of purpose. I turned to