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Reno’s eyes, I’d strike a match and burn the money for the spirits. Then, pulling out my father’s picture, I would begin to pray to my only connection in the spirit world. “Please please please, Daddy. I’ll give you everything if you give my mother back.” I begged, reasoning that as a dead preacher, my father would be able to get God to intercede on my mother’s behalf, or—as a spirit himself and in collusion with the other vengeful ghosts holding my mother captive—he might be persuaded by my own burnt offerings and bribes to free her.

    When my mother began talking about how she killed my father, I thought that the spirits were coming to claim her again. “Stop, Mommy,” I said, rubbing the shrimp juice from her fingers. “You don’t know what you’re saying.” At ten, despite all the people coming to hear her talk this way, I was still afraid that someone would hear my mother’s craziness and lock her up. It wasn’t until I reached high school that I actually started hoping that that would happen. “You’re not yourself,” I said loudly.
    â€œQuiet!” My mother smacked my hand, just as she did when I couldn’t memorize the times table. “Who else would I be? Pay attention!” She took the dishcloth, folded it into a rectangle, then a square, smoothing the wrinkles. “I wished him to death,” she said. “Every day I think, every day I pray, ‘Die, die,’ sending him death-wish arrows, until one day my prayers were answered.”
    â€œOh God,” I groaned, my eyes rolling toward the back of my head. “So you didn’t actually, physically kill him. Like with a knife or something.”
    She whacked my hand again. “I’m teaching you something very important about life. Listen: Sickness, bad luck, death, these things are not accidents. This kind stuff, people wish on you. Believe me, I know! And if you cannot block these wishes, all the death thoughts people send you collect, become arrows in your back. This is what causes wrinkles and make your shoulders fold inward.”
    She looked at me slouching into my chair, shoulders hunched into my body. I straightened up.
    â€œDeath thoughts turn your hair white, make you weak and break you, sucking out your life. I tell you these things,” she said, touching my hair with her blistering hands, “to protect you.”
    She leaned toward me, and as she bent forward to kiss or hug me, I could see veins of white hair running through her black braid. Before she could touch me, I pushed away from the table, turning toward the sink to prepare the shrimp for the annual meal that made my mother’s hands crack open and bleed.

    I look at myself in the mirror now and see the same strands of white streaking across my dark head. I squint, and the lines in the corners of my eyes deepen, etching my face in the pattern that was my mother’s. And I think: It has taken me nearly thirty years, almost all of my life, but finally the wishes I flung out in childhood have come true.
    My mother is dead.

2

AKIKO
    The baby I could keep came when I was already dead.
    I was twelve when I was murdered, fourteen when I looked into the Yalu River and, finding no face looking back at me, knew that I was dead. I wanted to let the Yalu’s currents carry my body to where it might find my spirit again, but the Japanese soldiers hurried me across the bridge before I could jump.
    I did not let them get too close. I knew they would see the name and number stenciled across my jacket and send me back to the camps, where they think nothing of using a dead girl’s body. When the guards started to step toward me, I knew enough to walk on, to wave them back to their post, where they would watch for other Koreans with that “special look” in their eyes. Before the Japanese government posted the soldiers—“for the good of the