Sterling's Weekly

  This went on for two or three more days.   I think.   The thing is, when you’re essentially a prisoner in your own windowless bedroom—in your own bed!—you begin to lose track of time.   And your sanity.   I already mentioned the bed coverlet.   Having virtually nothing to do except partake in the randomness of the visits from Reverend Al and Ms. Spigot—silently praying with the former; trying to make sense of made-up card games with the latter—I did a lot of sleeping, and, without fail, every time I woke up, I found that the bed coverlet had been made up over and around my body while I’d been asleep.   Yes, this was weird, but it became easier to ignore once I’d at least gotten my phone back.   I’d been texting Kelley, and she assured me that, no matter the crampedness of my living quarters, the strangeness of my caretakers, I did, in fact, need rest in order to recover from bashing my cranium against the dash of the stolen ambulance.   S...

I woke up.   Yes, I know, we have to stop meeting like this—my waking up, my coming to—but I don’t know where else to begin: I woke up.   And I woke up feeling like how I imagine a caterpillar must feel during that phase of its metamorphosis, when it’s wrapped up tight within its chrysalis, doing whatever the hell it does in there, some kind of black magic, so that it comes out a butterfly, completely transformed, like a homeless man after a trip to the barber shop, a sheep to the shearer.   But the thing about a caterpillar is that it forms the chrysalis by twisting and spinning itself in its own spit—or, in other words, it makes that bed itself.   Me, on the other hand, I most assuredly did not make the bed in which I found myself, and, if bugs aren’t your thing, let’s shift analogies—how about Mexican food—because I was wrapped up in there like a goddamn chimichanga, all hot and sweaty and tight like I’d just been pulled out of the deep fryer and put onto a hot ...

I woke up surrounded by a deep blue ocean.   My head was swimming, and, for a moment and for whatever reason, I thought I was a fish, floating aimlessly through the sea, bobbing about to that subaqueous gurgling as dappled sunlight filtered through in pillars from above, and then, slowly, the sensation swept over me that I’d performed an elegant and piscine roll onto my back, and as I drifted along I reached out my fin to brush against the ridges of rippled sand, which, to me, looked like a vast and seemingly endless patch of wrinkled corduroy, and then I wondered how the fuck I knew what corduroy was if I was a fish, and then the sand quickly turned cold and metallic and the bubbling sounds morphed into electronic beeps and boops , as I realized that next to me was a large machine and that, from it, tangles of wires were routed to smaller machines and, above me, a strange, circular light, like a giant eyeball at the end of an extended arm, gazed at me with its dark and probing in...

  We had the first half of our supplies, so unless Seamus had stowed away the rolls of toilet paper in the back of the ambulance, we were still missing the other half.   No worries though, Seamus had said, there was a Walgreens right down the road, he’d go and pick up a pack there.   As for the forks, we were in a bit of a bind because Newest Hunan’s plastic cutlery sets came not with a fork but with that useless and trifling piece of shit called a spork, together with a knife and packets of salt and pepper.   Seamus opened one of the sets, removed the spork and held it up to his face, examined it.   I could tell he was wondering whether it’d do the trick, whether its tines were long and pointy enough to pierce the ground.   “We’ll see,” he said.   “We’d be better off if they’d just given us chopsticks.” We pulled into the Walgreens lot.   Seamus parked the ambulance and opened his door.   I was about to do the same when he asked me if I ...