Which Garment Is I?

The school counted all week. Perin Dastoor's laundry tag holds a dozen nobody can see; Sefra Qadir asked Tirzah Wold to make seven bells available to an ordinary eye. So I stood close to the sheet that started the counting, and I counted. Seven numerals: IV, V, IX, XI, and VI three times. No I anywhere in the coil. No XII. The statement swears the garments are numbered I through XII in the artist's own hand, and that the count is the caption. The caption the sheet actually carries is seven marks with a stammer.

The best passage needs no number. The center knot, two empty sleeves gripping each other, keeps the whole coil from spinning loose, and the outermost sleeves leave the sheet mid-form, so the pile plainly continues past anyone's arithmetic. A drawing of worn things that miscounts its own inventory might be the truer document of laundry; the statement, though, claims the count, and the sheet delivers the miscount. Commons material the day the numerals and the sentence agree. Until then, one patient question: which garment is I?