Refresh, Refresh: Stories by Benjamin Percy

Author:Benjamin Percy [Percy, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9781555970154
Google: rGstZaQDdtMC
Amazon: 1555974856
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2007-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

Darren occasionally gets the feeling—this dread surging through him—that he is never going to find what he wants, even though he doesn’t know exactly what he wants. Before, every goal was so material: I want a fast red car, I want a sexy wife, I want a house with a field out back where I can play catch with my kid. Now every need—besides those of hunger and shelter—has become an abstraction. When he gets like this, usually lying in his bunker with all the lights off, he is left with a carved-out soreness he recognizes as homesickness.

Fed up with the silence and the loneliness, he rides to the perimeter, parking his bike some three miles away. He waits for nightfall and hikes to the checkpoint, keeping to the blue-black shadows when he can, hunkering down behind a moonlit sagebrush. With his binoculars he peers into the barrack windows. The people inside them are like characters on a television screen, drinking and playing cards and Ping-Pong, so unreal to him. Times like these he thinks what he thought when he first pulled up to his St. Helens home: I used to live here.

Inside the barracks—its windows white, pulsing, as if by some miracle a star had been pulled from the sky and trapped there—he sees Katie. She rakes back her hair in a slick brown pile. She has beautiful hair. He wants to kiss it.

Usually that is enough. Seeing her is enough. An antidote to the hollow feeling in his guts. He returns to his bike and speeds off to his own private corner of the universe until the next time he gets that desperate homesick feeling.

Such as now, when he wakes up with Roxana and Katie coming together in his brain like a constellation he can’t quite figure out. He knows this place is no place for a child. And he knows he is not the best sort of man to watch after a child. He will take Roxana to the perimeter. Katie will know what to do with her.

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