Refresh, Refresh: Stories

I drove to Bend, to the Carmichael Candy factory. Everyday the janitors swept from its floors enough cookie crumbs to fill a fifty-gallon drum. For twenty bucks, they let me take all of it, along with a compromised batch of caramel. At home, in an industrial bucket, I mashed up a few pounds of cookie crumbs and caramel,

when I came home and saw what the bear had done.

turned around to look for the man in the cowboy hat and he’s gone—there’s only an empty hole on the boulder where he sat.

in his broad face and quiet presence—

father. But I was wrong. It was just a man.

can hardly remember. There’s the train—there’s Josh Henderson—there’s the Deschutes County Fair and of course the weekend stock-car races and the fat-bellied trout that drift along the shadowy banks of the Metolious River and dozens more diversions, all tiny and meant to distract me from the big spell of nothing that had settled over Tumalo. So whe

He puts it in his pocket, and later in a Ziploc bag, to keep.

When the man tries to intervene, waving his arms in a fury, the backhoe swings around like a scorpion, its shovel knocking him down. An accident, everyone agrees.

boy and his reflection, momentarily unbalanced, realizing some resemblance between them. The boy coughs and some blood dribbles