Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy

Performed by Ted Marcoux  Teenage boys wait for news from their fathers in Iraq.  The boys make contact with their fathers through e-mail, and find themselves pushing their refresh buttons, often in vain. Thus, "Our fathers haunted us. . . . Our fathers, who had been taken from us, were everywhere, at every turn, imprisoning us." Before long, almost as a way of identifying with their lost fathers, the boys are impelled to commit their own kind of violence, and their target becomes the recruitment officer. This story also appears on "Wartime Lives".