Little Factor

How old were you then, when the days went all one way, like little hairs? When your brother carried you on his shoulders so you could feel what it would be like to move through the world a grown man? Even with your hands atop his head, he seemed taller. The trees, the overgrown buildings, the monstrous abstractions already in your mind and soon to grow from your neck—because it was from your neck that you spoke them—like goiters. Your brother, longshanks, broad as life in the shoulders, so large of frame even the bricklayers and barfighters called him Big Factor. The earth beneath his feet, so far below you would spit off to the side to watch it fall, counting off the minutes and hours and days it would take for even one of those white specks to land. And by then, it would be long behind you. Everything: you could see it all. Sparrows and chimney swifts, the smaller, keener birds, more honed to those secret knives sharpening in the wind, circled around you. Up there, you watched the people come and go, small and then smaller; everyone, mother and drunk stumbler and delivery man alike, disappeared down the drain of their own vanishing point. As they went, you and your brother waved at them. Up there everything aged slower. You touched the underbellies of leaves on the lower branches. Wherever you pointed, your brother took off walking. It was a mobile kind of life, that you could believe in. But all movement is an illusion, as a wise head once said, exercising the lower case magic of noble rhetoric, and your brother, older as he was, and taller, real as a stump after its tree has fallen, knew enough about walking to appreciate the subtlety of standing still. Okay, he said, time to crawl down, little brother. You knew it would only make him taller if you said no; taller and harder to climb down from. So down you went. From neck to shoulder to back to hip and downwards—his right leg taking days to lower yourself from. Leaping off his boot, striking ground, you looked around. No more looking up. You asked him, your great big, older taller stronger brother, what now? Now, he asked? Now it’s my turn. Ready those shoulders, little brother.