A fortune teller told his mother he would not live past twenty, and his mother did what women in that village did: she bound a figure out of straw at the kitchen table, dressed it in the blue jacket he had outgrown, wrote a name on a strip of yellow paper and pushed it inside the collar. Then she buried it in the yard behind the house, where he had been born, and never spoke about it again in his hearing.
He lived past twenty. He lived past thirty. At forty-two he came back to the empty house with a spade, mostly out of a curiosity he could not have defended to anyone, and dug where the grass had never grown quite right.
The straw came up black and fell apart when he lifted it. The jacket had rotted, but the blue was still blue, and he could still find the place at the cuff where it had torn.
The paper was inside the collar where she had put it. It cracked along a fold when he opened it.
The name on it was not his. It was his brother's — the older brother who had died at birth, whom he had been told about perhaps four times in his whole life, always briefly, always with his mother looking at something else.
He stood in the yard with the paper in both hands and worked back through it the way you work back through an arithmetic error, and arrived where he was always going to arrive.
His mother had never once called him by his name. She had called him the second one. He had thought, for forty-two years, that this was a joke about birth order.