One night after he took too much, Stephen hallucinated a rat in a fedora standing next to the longcase clock smoking a cigar and drinking a highball. The rat nodded (approvingly, he thought) when Stephen started doing shots. 

He came to, face down on a stranger's lawn. He had bitten through his bottom lip and wet his pants.

They sent him back to rehab. This time, it seemed to take. He was able to graduate, and his parents pulled a few strings and got him a job in the city.

I ran into him a few months before he died. We were both walking past a department store with headless mannequins in the window.  

"As you can see, we're the last two people left on earth," Stephen said, pointing toward the window, but we were standing on a crowded sidewalk and the words didn't seem to make sense.

I laughed anyway. I was on my way to a meeting. I'd been working on a proposal for two weeks solid and I didn't want to be late. The guy was supposed to be kind of a hard-ass. Stephen twirled the ends of an invisible mustache. He called me "my pet." We made vague plans to get together the next time I was in town.

He had dark circles under his eyes, but he seemed happy, and I kissed his cheek as we went our separate ways.
.

Leah Browning's fiction has been published in The Threepenny Review and many others. "Longcase Clock" appears in ORCHARD CITY, a chapbook that's out from Hyacinth Girl Press.

Read Haley Benson's 2 ½ Questions interview with Leah.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of Elsa Lopez.

W i g l e a f               04-08-18                                [home]