When we were small, we played at Mass, my sisters and I (though not this one, not she who leads me here), setting up an altar on the backstair. I was always the priest, we never questioned it: a bedsheet chasuble, clothesline cincture, the altar a stair, the faithful behind me (veiled, I think). I recall the time I would spend before the ceremony working the Wonder Bread between my fingers, pressing it into hosts of surprising flatness, though always a little crowned at the center where the contour would not press out, always faintly grey from the fingers. Even so airless, thin, tasteless, melting in an instant when my sisters took them in their uplifted, fervent mouths.