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…

I wanted people to look at my face and see an equation. In the bathroom mirror, I stretched my skin. Fingers pushed together a prominent chin, the right triangle of a Roman nose. For a moment, I could sustain a fantasy. I could make my mother out of myself. On other side of the door,…

For A.T. The engine’s haphazard coughs were the first sounds that reached the villagers of P—. These were soon followed by the fighter’s final plunge into the hillside, the concussive boom knocking clay jars and the more timid to the floor. Yet it was the muted sky in the immediate aftermath that arrested the imaginations…

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light!” I said this to Sean, my beautiful ten-year-old with the unstoppable brain tumor. He laughed and punched my arm. This tumor, for some reason, made him constantly happy. He brought whoopee cushions to chemo. Everyone loved him, said he was so brave, that he’d win the fight,…

In the beginning, I placed messages in RC Cola cans and left them on bus benches or in the corner of a stair at the Hood Museum. A girl is in the tower, they said. A girl is standing by the shrunken head. A girl is waiting on the flagstone steps of the cathedral. Although…