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I hunkered down between the wall and the wicker basket of shirts. I had decided to start with the earliest item—when I had smashed a spider against the white side of the house: it was the first thing I killed. I said, clearly, “I killed a spider,” and it was nothing; she did not hit me or throw hot starch at me. It sounded like nothing to me too. How strange when I had had such feelings of death shoot through my hand and into my body so that I would surely die. So I had to continue, of course, and let her know how important it had been. “I returned every day to look at its smear on the side of the house,” I said. “It was our old house, the one we lived in until I was five. I went to the wall every day to look. I studied the stain.” Relieved because she said nothing but only continued squeezing the starch, I went away feeling pretty good. Just two hundred and six more items to go. I moved carefully all the next day so as not to do anything or have anything happen to me that would make me go back to two hundred and seven again. I’d tell a couple of easy ones and work up to how I had pulled the quiet girl’s hair and how I had enjoyed the year being sick. If it was going to be this easy, maybe I could blurt out several a day, maybe an easy one and a hard one. I could go chronologically, or I could work from easy to hard or hard to easy, depending on my mood. On the second night I talked about how I had hinted to a ghost girl that I wished I had a doll of my own until she gave me a head and body to glue together—that she hadn’t given it to me of her own generosity but because I had hinted. But on the fifth night (I skipped two to reward myself) I decided it was time to do a really hard one and tell her about the white horse. And suddenly the duck voice came out, which I did not use with the family. “What’s it called, Mother”—the duck voice coming out talking to my own mother—“when a person whispers to the head of the sages—no, not the sages, more like the buddhas but not real people like the buddhas (they’ve always lived in the sky and never turned into people like the buddhas)—and you whisper to them, the boss of them, and ask for things? They’re like magicians? What do you call it when you talk to the boss magician?”

“‘Talking-to-the-top-magician,’ I guess.”

“I did that. Yes. That’s it. That’s what I did. I talked-to-the-top-magician and asked for a white horse.” There. Said.

“Mm,” she said, squeezing the starch out of the collar and cuffs. But I had talked, and she acted as if she hadn’t heard.

Perhaps she hadn’t understood. I had to be more explicit. I hated this. “I kneeled on the bed in there, in the laundry bedroom, and put my arms up like I saw in a comic book”—one night I heard monsters coming through the kitchen, and I had promised the god in the movies, the one the Mexicans and Filipinos have, as in “God Bless America,” that I would not read comic books anymore if he would save me just this once; I had broken that promise, and I needed to tell all this to my mother too—“and in that ludicrous position asked for a horse.”

“Mm,” she said, nodded, and kept dipping and squeezing.

On my two nights off, I had sat on the floor too but had not said a word.

“Mother,” I whispered and quacked.

“I can’t stand this whispering,” she said looking right at me, stopping her squeezing. “Senseless gabbings every night. I wish you would stop. Go away and work. Whispering, whispering, making no sense. Madness. I don’t feel like hearing your craziness.”

So I had to stop, relieved in some ways. I shut my mouth, but I felt something alive tearing at my throat, bite by bite, from the inside. Soon there would be three hundred things, and too late to get them out before my mother grew old and died.

I had probably interrupted her in the middle of her own quiet time when the boiler and presses were off and the cool night flew against the windows in moths and crickets. Very few customers came in. Starching the shirts for the next day’s pressing was probably my mother’s time to ride off with the