Refresh, Refresh: Stories

Here was the cold spring—the size of a hot tub—surrounded by willows and sun-sparkled stones, and next to it, our firepit, and next to it, a body. The man had been dead a long time. So

“I’m being seriously serious. We’re having a goddamn baby.”

He remembers there was once a smell to stores like this—fertilizer mixed with rubber mixed with PVC fumes mixed with hydraulic oil—that was a good smell, no longer, replaced by the heavy stink of an animal’s den. He peeks around Aisle 10 and sees the dogs gathered

On the news Iraqi insurgents fired their assault rifles. On the news a car bomb in Baghdad detonated, killing seven American soldiers at a traffic checkpoint. On the news the president said he did not think it was wise to provide a time frame for troop withdrawal. I checked my e-mail before breakfast and found nothing but spam—promises of great mor

She steps into her panties and zips up her jeans and pulls a fleece over her head and asks, as she begins lacing her boots, whether he is coming or not.

A drop of blood gathered along the corner of his eye and streaked down his temple into his hair.

Black bags grew beneath the eyes of the sons and daughters and wives of Tumalo, their shoulders stooped, wrinkles enclosing their mouths like parentheses.

Gordon reemerged with a horrible smile on his face and I followed him up the hillside, crashing through the undergrowth, leaving Seth to make sense of the nightmare that had descended upon him without warning.

their feathers shining blackly, their wings trembling against the updrafts and wind currents. More soon arrive. Perhaps they too are drawn by the smell of blood. Or perhaps they are drawn from the forest as leaves are swept up into a dust devil, as if summoned, by the endless spinning of the vultures, their cyclonic power. Jim calls out for his gra