Jenny sees Eva’s gaze drop to Jenny’s shoes. This is it. It’s over.
She smiles, pretending they just met. Pretending she was never afraid of Eva, like nothing ever happened. Fake it till you make it. Whatever gets her out in one piece.
“How funny that we have the same shoes, huh?”
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The successful ticket machine would reply cheerfully to each order… would provide enough agitation and compliance to let someone yell at it, let them explode while it sits silently. But all of these actions would be purely surface level. The machine won’t ache for a better life, for fulfillment. The best android won’t long to be human. Continue reading
You too can be good at math if you spend your days bashing your head against it and your nights wondering why it doesn’t love you back. Continue reading
And yet the silence left holes in my bones and I realized how much I wanted you to speak to me but you weren’t speaking to me, and inside I felt like the blue part of the fire, the part that’s the most hot. Continue reading
But the stories I’ve selected for Issue 4 all immediately made me put down my cheese and focus. I even had to sit up because I was laughing and it’s hard to lie on my back and laugh with cheese in my mouth. You try it. Continue reading
The plan was really a three-part process. Scope out the wild of Cherapunjee and get a feel for the landscape. Cover himself in leaves or toucan dung or something equally rugged and ambush the beast. Board a flight back home and hand Trixie the camera and say, “This is for you, now give me my last name back…” Continue reading
Phillipa didn’t seem like the sort of person who kept a seagull in the freezer. I was looking for ice at three in the morning when I found it, right behind the microwavable meals and fish sticks. Continue reading
Standing up from the bed and looking me over, he mutters. I giggle. “I don’t know Spanish.”
“I thought you were Dominican,” he says. There is a weird pause. “What are you?”
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Stones in Translation Insects eat sage and rabbit bush. Snakes and lizards eat insects and other snakes and lizards. Bobcats eat rats and mice. Rats and mice eat snake eggs and lizard eggs. Wolves and coyotes eat jackrabbits, rats, and mice. Hawks and owls eat any small animals they can catch; vultures eat the dead. … Continue reading
Sammy Proctor was one weird motherfucker. He couldn’t even try to kill himself like a normal person. Sammy tried to overdose on weed, which is the first and only time I’ve heard of someone trying to go out that way. I guess he listened to the lectures on how it was a dangerous drug and took them a little too seriously. It didn’t work, obviously, so he tried to hang himself from a pipe in our room using his belt. That didn’t work either. The pipe broke and caused a flood. I wasn’t too happy about the whole thing because a) half my stuff was ruined, and b) it was my weed. Continue reading
The James Franco Review 