A guy remembers the brief period in which he worked in a hospice.

(Contemporary American Short Fiction)

These were conversations after we had no emotions left.

I haven’t read much Palahniuk, just some essays, mostly because he mostly writes novels but also because my outsider impression of him is that he is obsessed with the ugliness of life, and I’m not sure how often that mood strikes this reader. (That sentence is pretty ugly, sorry.) But the ugliness in the somber “Escort” is also pretty beautiful. Blunt, yes, but fair. To ugliness.