The Shaman from Monaco

by Flora Yin-Wong

At the start of 2015, I met a Canadian ex-banker-turned-shamanic healer from Monaco, who was in China to close a deal on his robotic inventions. He introduced himself by coming over to my table in a hotel café and asking me what I was doing here. A straightforward question, yet it hung in the air, reluctant and vague.

Intwine

At first, after I slipped them out of their kidney-shaped chemical bag and slid my lube-covered legs in, they fitted like normal jeans. All those five-star ratings, all those celebrity endorsements, totally vanilla people openly sharing orgasms on a global scale – all through the magic of Intwine.

Love Advice from Larry Flynt

I have three icons: Joan Rivers, Martha Stewart and Larry Flynt. So, when I drove to Beverly Hills to meet Flynt at his headquarters, I was giddy like a schoolgirl at a pop concert – just my Bieber happens to be a 73-year-old, foul-mouthed pornographer bound to a wheelchair.

helloitschloe

Mira would say that Chloe came back into her life the week she got her ass slapped raw in a porn viewing booth in downtown Toronto, but that’s not true. It is true that the third chapter of the story of Chloe and Mira, as scripted by Mira, started then.

Childhood Sexuality and Shame

I had been humping Happy, my stuffed Mickey Mouse doll, and now I was in trouble. Happy was a present from the tooth fairy, so I must have been about six years old. We lived on an American island in the Caribbean.

On Facing the Motherhood Dilemma

Afew years ago, I didn’t think making a family was a part of my future. I had just been asked to be in my first film. The director (who has since become a good friend) met me in a celebrity-infested West Hollywood restaurant, where we knocked back hard booze and talked about her film.

Why Today's "Lonely Crowd" Should Let 'Life Stages' Go

What was your New Year’s resolution? Research shows the most common commitments are health- or body image-related. But in truth, these are simply different ways to express the same desire – a craving to better fit society’s mould.

Menagerie

Thousands of animal species are threatened by anthropogenic climate change. Here is a small sample. Axolotls are those enchanting salamanders, limb-growers, Bowie-esque in style and, now, frequency. Bicknell’s thrush with confetti of stars on breast, insect quests no longer synchronised. Coral (staghorn), crystalline dendrites of the deep, food for many before warming and mass bleach.

To Be Good

‘D’you want a hand with that?’ he says, a hand-rolled fag hanging from the corner of his lip, unlit, of course.

She pushes the crate of milk bottles onto the flatbed of the float.

‘Don’t often see a lady doing this job.’

‘No?’

Somewhere in Between, Part 1: Bad Boyfriend

“It was you,” Shay says slowly, but forcefully, her face lighting up as if she were a cartoon with a bulb above her head, but she’s not. She’s a real, human person sitting in front of me and name dropping a lot. One of the names she’s dropped is Jesse’s and she’s saying it’s hard to work with him and I say I know, in a way that implies I really, really know.