Ramshackle Review

Downtime

by Justis Mills

Her favorite movies play at twenty-four frames per second, which is to say eight frames every third of a second, meaning eight for every blink, every snap, every cracked knuckle or lit cigarette or lips pursed over a straw.

Her favorite books are a few hundred pages, perhaps a hundred thousand words, and so, each thousand being a picture, they are about a hundred frames: four seconds. Four seconds of mountain air, vacuumed into a deep breath, elements of which escape to drift above the tree line.

Her favorite songs are four minutes, almost sixty thousand frames, more than she can hold. She plays them on old-fashioned headphones with legs crossed, humming to the drums, to the synthesizers, to bass beats like worn out bullfrogs: never to the lyrics.





Justis Mills edits First Stop Fiction. His work has recently appeared in Leaf Garden and been featured on FictionDaily, and is forthcoming in The Bicycle Review. He drinks ice water with eight cubes, always.