After that day I never saw the man again. The house became a watchmaker’s shop whose owner had a glass eye. One by one my sisters continued to leave or pass away, disappearing along with my mother. I went on washing the floors and the laundry and mending the socks, until destiny imperceptibly took hold of my house, carrying everyone away except my oldest sister’s son. There was nothing left of them, save a few stray socks and darned nightgowns and a photograph of my father surrounded by an unknown family in miniature.

Today I look in this cracked mirror and still recognize the braids I learned to do when I was little, thick at the top and tapered at the bottom like the bottle-shaped trunks of silk floss trees. I have always had the pale face of an old woman, but now my forehead is crossed with lines, like a road ridden over by many wheels—creases that were once grimaces caused by the sun.

I recognize this forehead, never smooth, but I no longer know my sister’s boy, once gentle. I believed he would always be a newborn when they handed him to me wrapped in a flannel blanket, light blue for a boy. I woke those mornings to his buoyant laughter, bathed in the clearest waters, and his crying blessed my nights.

But the clothes that families would give me to wash or mend, stitching vanilla-pod patterns on napkins and tablecloths, encroached on my days as my sister’s boy started to crawl, learned to walk, and went to school. I didn’t realize that his voice had dropped, spiraling down to a deeper tone when he turned sixteen, like the voice of one of his classmates who came over to help with his homework. I didn’t realize until the day he was to give a speech at a school function, and I heard him rehearsing—until then I had believed that the dark voice came from his bedside radio.

How many vanillas must I have stitched or baked, vanilla stitches, vanilla shortcakes (as I mustn’t miss opportunities to sell my cakes or pastries whenever I can), how many hems and cuffs must I have shortened, how much white foam must I have beaten washing the clothes and the floors? I don’t want to see anymore. This boy, who was almost my own, now has that unfamiliar voice that bellows from the radio. I’m trapped in the dark little room of my hands, and through the windows of my fingers I see a pair of men’s shoes on the edge of the bed. That boy who was almost my son, that voice giving a speech on politics from a radio nearby, is surely that same man with his willow branch for swatting mosquitoes. And that empty crib, wrought of iron . . .

I close the windows, shut my eyes, and see blue, green, red, yellow, purple, white, white. White foam. Blue. Death will be like this, when it drags me from the little room of my hands.