Uphill all the Way

My Brother’s Paper Route

Now that the route was mine, I could buy a new bike like his, I thought, and imagined how I looked as I climbed uphill wearing the bag,

a kind of uniform, its orange band crossing my chest and attaching above the newspaper’s name that hung below my waist. Nobody watched

at the windows except the old woman in a bathrobe who clung to me while she spread her newspaper out on the table in her dim room,

pulling the small letters under the pool of her magnifying glass. When I got out at last in the twilight the streets seemed different. Was this

house with peeling paint the one my brother had shown me on the corner? Was this the right corner? The man inside the house so loudly swore

at his wife he could not hear me knock at the tall scratched door. And what was I to do under the light of the streetlamp with the two

leftover newspapers in my bag, and the ache in my shoulder from carrying it, too young to understand the sorrow and poverty on that hill of streets, or how the thing you thought you owned could own you.

Shame

You are beyond shame, my mother said after my father left us. What else are you hiding? I never told her about the photograph

of naked women and men in a cart beside a fence from his book about the war, some with hair at their crotches, some with asses like mine,

like everyone’s, except, being dead, they had nothing to hide, and the shame was all mine for finding them. I went on turning its pages,

time after time, past the portraits of generals wearing ties like my father, past flashes of gunfire and rolling hills of smoke

and flame, to these forgotten ones, lying together in their secret, more frightening than my mother chasing me from couch

to chair with her switch to make war against her broken heart. For in this place there was no running or screaming. Here

nobody knew their terrible stillness but me, the one beyond shame, who left them all naked, and returned to find them, and never told.