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…

The idea came to me from nowhere, as many of my ideas do. One morning it was just there in my head on the drive to work. It was one of those ideas that kept it up, hanging out in the back of my mind, gnawing on my free moments like a puppy with a…

In June, marine biologists panicked on the news. Disappearing sharks. Only a couple at first, ones tagged for research. But then they noticed it was wider spread. Populations off the coast of Florida were dropping. When they decided the other local populations — fish and such — were normal and stable, they expanded their search,…

The Other Women in my family think writing is an ugly, dirty process. “It’s destructive,” Mother warned me. And my aunts echoed, “Yes, yes. After all, to write each son must kill his own father.” But how? I wondered. By eating him? And what must the daughters do? The Other Women in my family have…