"Alive on Arrival"

Brand New Serial Fiction!!!

The Albany Medical Center

Emergency Surgery Unit

1

 I’m pronounced dead at precisely 12:33 PM.

How do I know this if I’m dead? I’m watching everything that’s happening to my prone, five-feet-eight-inch, one-hundred-eighty-pound, Gold’s Gym buffed-up body. Okay, I exaggerate. I’m not entirely that buff for a middle-aged writer who spends most of his day seated at his laptop. Or used to anyway. But I digress. Or what do the editors call it? Going off the rails?

Let’s begin again, shall we?

I’m pronounced dead at precisely 12:33 when the presiding, black-bearded young E.R. surgeon says so. There’s one of those big, round grammar school clocks mounted to one of the walls and it looks pretty accurate to me. Or maybe I was dead on arrival and they’re only now tossing in the towel since it’s almost lunchtime.