What do you say when your child calls, from over 500 miles away, and says, “I am not happy here.” And you do sincerely want this child to be happy, but you cannot say, “Your life is just beginning; this is only the beginning,” because you cannot run on the same slogans two campaigns in…

People took pictures of me. The first time it happened I liked it. I smiled big. I was driving with the windows down, and I heard someone say, Are you really the Teacher of the Year? I nodded. My car had magnet signs on the doors. The car was a new crossover SUV, one of…

Most of all Krista wanted Thuy Luu’s eyes. There wasn’t much about the young civil engineer that the American didn’t like. Now, the quiet dry restaurant after several sprints in and among downpours at the Tan Son Nhat terminal and the rice wine conspired to sink Krista into a warm and willing place, luxuriating in…

I am a certified Ghost Prostitute for War Vets, on call 24/7 and then some. I love this job. I do it for free. Being a “ghost prostitute” does not entail screwing ghosts. It means I died. You live. I serve as a spectral lover for scores of men, but promise to be exactly who…

Before she left, Tanya’s friends and relatives warned her about pickpockets, skinheads, con artists, mob activity, HIV, regressive gender roles, rude waitstaff, long black nights. They warned her not to carry her valuables around with her, or to dress too extravagantly, or to go out alone after dark. Her aunt, the one who had called…

Our father has buried his heart in the yard. We’ve searched for it every day for weeks now, my sister Janna and Fig and I, and so far we’ve found nothing. When we come inside to eat or sleep, our father stares right through us. His eyes are rusty metal, the blue has leached out…

Try not to notice the lights in the rear view mirror but when you do, pull over. Look at the fragile gold line along the darkening horizon and start to worry. Calculate how long this will take. Try not to think about how you were barely going to make it before and now this. Wonder…

My first memory: the Panama airport. Not first in my life, but first that stands out from that trip to Ecuador when I was eleven. We were going to spend a year there; the way it felt, we might have been leaving the country for good. I remember a contraband runner at the departure gate,…

This used to be the peep show, says the manager. She walks me through the attic of the club. The halls are lined with mirrors, like a a dim-lit sexual Versailles. Red wires of lights appear to make my movements glow. It’s storage now. She taps a naked mannequin. Brown boxes tower up against the…

She didn’t mean to have twenty babies. It was an accident, the unexpected result of one wild night. But once they were there inside her, she couldn’t throw them out. She explored her options, talked to doctors and shamans and priests. All told her that twenty was too many for one woman — that either…

Buzzcut: The Massacre Begins Ruth and the other kids screamed at her to run, but Candace was already running. She ran faster than Ruth had ever seen. From inside the school bus, she watched her best friend gasp for air. Her small breasts jiggled beneath her tattered T-shirt. The masked psycho must’ve ripped it somewhere…

When your father calls at two in the morning to ask if you’d like to go fishing, your first instinct is to say no, perhaps in not so succinct or polite a term, but on unbidden reflection you realize that some of the best bits of your life — the weekend in Vegas where the…