Leah Browning

Velocity

Leah Browning

And then, suddenly, time is moving too fast. At the hospital, the magazine has Ben Affleck vacationing with his girlfriend in Puerto Rico, but on the internet their breakup is old news: he’s already gone through a Jack in the Box drive-thru with a Playboy Playmate and Jennifer Garner checked him back into rehab. In the chair next to me a woman is using one finger to scroll through her Twitter feed like a zombie while a man across the room stabs impatiently at the buttons of the coffee machine. Now Demi Lovato has left Cedars-Sinai and gone to treatment. It seems that the missing bodies are finally turning up and the fall shows are almost ready to debut; wildfires continue to burn up and down the west coast, and a twin-engine Cessna carrying five people crashed into the parking lot of a strip mall and everyone on board was killed. We’re on the cusp of a drought, a flood, the quake to end all quakes: the earth is loosening, careening off its axis, waves convulsing against the shore. Faster, louder. All around us, they’re sounding the alarms, and still we go on sitting here. Waiting, waiting.

Leah Browning lives in California and is the author of three short nonfiction books and six chapbooks of poetry and fiction. Her work has recently appeared in Four Way Review, The Broadkill Review, Oyster River Pages, The Forge Literary Magazine, The Threepenny Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Watershed Review, Random Sample Review, Belletrist Magazine, Poetry South, The Stillwater Review, Superstition Review, Santa Ana River Review, Newfound, The Homestead Review, Bellows American Review, Coldnoon, Clementine Unbound, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. www.leahbrowninglit.com