Sterling's Weekly

Without much hesitation, I got in, like a stupid and trusting child in one of those to-catch-a-predator-themed thrillers, you know, with the criminal who looks a lot like Christopher Lloyd’s Switchblade Sam from Dennis the Menace , rolling up in his stereotypically nondescript rear-windowless white van, luring the kiddie in with promises of candy and ice cream before he goes in for the nap, and you’re on the edge of your seat going Don’t do it, kid, there’re clearly no frozen treats in the back of that van! and Oh God, where the fuck are the parents?   Ah, but I wasn’t too concerned with any of that, about being adult-napped by Seamus, the brooding and somewhat sinister lug though that he was.   Plus, I was thinking as I hopped in, it was a fucking ambulance—pretty hard to blend in, to stay under the radar—and, if it actually came down to it, I’d just go half-psycho girlfriend on him and start pushing all the buttons, pulling all the levers, turning all the knobs.   Sh...

Out of all the things Kelley had told me, she’d never mentioned that she was deathly afraid of bugs.   But perhaps that’s too presumptuous.   Maybe it wasn’t the cicada itself but rather the fact it’d ejected its head from its body like a Rock’em Sock’em Robot.   So, that’s how I found myself riding in the back of an ambulance and heading to the hospital for the second time in under a week.   The trip from DRIP to the hospital took less than ten minutes, but ten minutes was more than enough time for Seamus, the pouty EMT riding in the back with me, to rattle on about his work relationship with Mike and Carl, the two EMTs in the front cabin.  Among the three of them, Seamus was the most junior and, as such, was conscripted into his role as the trunk monkey, forever forbidden to ride shotty, let alone drive the hulking wagon.  “They think they’re such hot shit,” he said, “ever since they saved that guy on the golf course.”  Well, turned out, while fini...

How a date could’ve been planned in the few seconds that Des, Kelley, and I had been standing there in the hospital hallway, I don’t know.   But, like I said before, I have no idea what I’d said or how long we’d been standing there.   It could’ve been a few seconds, it could’ve been a few minutes.   Being that close to beauty is like orbiting a massive, shimmering star.   Time is warped, distorted, like the before, during, and after of a dream, where in one moment, you’re lying awake in the dark, and then, in what feels like the immediate next, you realize you’re lying awake again, only this time in the daylight, with no clear memory of how you’d gotten there, of what all had passed aside from brief snippets that dissipate too quickly to be examined or remembered, but, clearly, something happens, just as something had happened in that hospital hallway—sure, how else could I have found myself a couple days later on a date with the beautiful Dr. Kelley Tablebottom at...

We were at the hospital. “What the fuck happened?” Des asked.   Ah, it was a long story, but I’ve been in the habit lately of making long stories short, so I told her that, basically, the Reverend Father Alabaster Fudge had swallowed St. Anvil’s sacral horn.   Man was that awkward.   You see, I’d agreed to assist Rev. Al in conjuring the miracle, but then he’d gone all archaic on me, blessing himself, murmuring obscure chants under his breath, and then he kneeled down and stuck out his tongue and, Christ, the thing looked like it belonged inside the shell of a mollusk, not the mouth of a human, all pallid and ashen like, devoid of any color that would hint at the presence of blood beneath its slippery surface, and I’d only just placed the bone there when who showed up but Ms. Spigot, exploding open the wooden door of the shrine like a SWAT team member and barreling herself into the space, demanding to know if Al had stolen her dentures again (remind me to ask him abou...