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By Root 495 0

got better after that, though. With every newspaper I threw those first weeks, I improved my accuracy and efficiency as I drove the deserted industrial streets of my route, slinging papers in a high arc over the roof of the car or flipping them backhand away from the driver’s side. I watched the papers slap against the scratched aluminum garage doors or bent black metal stairs at the backs of warehouses, watched papers skid across empty parking lots to hit curbs near walkways, sometimes tumbling to perfect stops against glass doors on which an all-caps OFFICE was stenciled in white. Once, after rocketing a paper up against the garage door of an auto parts warehouse and listening with satisfaction to the sharp report of news against metal, I made a tight turn and nearly ran over the body of a huge deer that lay motionless in the middle of the empty lot. As I drove carefully around it, I saw that there was no head—the neck ended in a meaty stump, from which a thick black stream of blood ran downhill. Misting rain had collected on the deer’s fur in pinpoint droplets that shone silver in the night, and I drove away thinking I should call someone to report it. I didn’t, though, and when I returned to the warehouse the next night, the body was gone.

4

Two weeks later, at 3:30 in the morning, I saw the boy. It was only for a moment, through a screen door, from a distance. I was moving; he was in shadow. He looked three or four, but he was wearing a one-piece sleeper, the kind that zips from a toddler’s ankle to his chin, so he was possibly younger. He stood behind the sagging mesh of the front screen door and looked out—at that time of night, he could only have been looking at his small dark lawn, and beyond the lawn my car, and within that car myself, throwing a newspaper toward his house. Beyond my car was only the summer night, humid and pointless: a rusted freight train went about its rumbling business; a million insects hissed their muted roar. Beyond that, there was nothing.

5

A young woman doctor at a local clinic diagnosed my injury. Her high cheekbones, green eyes, and long strawberry-blond hair were pleasant distractions as I sat shirtless on the paper-covered vinyl table, regretting my pale body. I recognized the woman—she’d treated my daughter Olivia just a year previously, after a bright red rash had blossomed across Olivia’s face and her eyelids began to swell shut while my wife Sara and I played with her in the park. Unaware of the grotesque change in her appearance, Olivia had smiled when the doctor ruffled her wispy, translucent hair that day, and giggled as the woman laid her fingertips against Olivia’s chubby cheeks and smooth forehead. The doctor had proclaimed Olivia cute, told us the rash was a reaction to sunscreen, and prescribed a bath.

When I sat before the same woman a year later, Sara and Olivia were with Sara’s parents in Seattle, and the doctor told me it was the first time she’d seen a repetitive motion injury from throwing papers. I received the news with a measure of pride. “You’ll want to take a few days off,” she said, “the joint needs rest.” I explained the seven-day-a-week nature of my job, and she frowned at the wall behind me for a moment, then delivered a short lecture on the mechanics of throwing motions, followed by some demonstrations of stretches to do before and after delivering. “You should treat the job as if it’s an athletic event, or things will just get worse,” she said, and when she bent to write on her prescription pad, I imagined trailing my fingers down the curve of her lower back, imagined her skin soft and smooth and warm beneath her white medical coat and green blouse. She tore the sheet from her pad and handed it to me. “Talk to the other deliverers,” she said. “See what kind of motion they use. If you don’t change anything, you’ll just be back here in two weeks.”

6

I got the prescription filled at a grocery store and took one of the cylindrical blue pills with some water as soon as I got home. Then I walked around the house, awaiting dramatic effects. If I didn’t