The story’s opening paragraph immediately introduces the reader to the intensity of Delia Jones’s work. It is 11:00 p.m. on a Sunday, and she is squatting on the kitchen floor sorting laundry. The concise details reveal that she is an efficient businessperson, carefully planning her week’s labor so she can deliver clean laundry and pick up the next week’s work in the same trip on Saturday. To have the work done well, she must start after church on Sunday and work steadily throughout the week.

Sykes Jones is introduced in Paragraph 2 and appears in Paragraph 3. Sykes is the story’s antagonist, and some critical elements of his character are introduced on first mention. First, it is revealed that Sykes is on Delia’s mind throughout her work—but not in a positive way. Rather, Delia “wonder[s] through it all where Sykes, her husband, had gone with her horse and buckboard” (Paragraph 2). This simple sentence foreshadows both Sykes’s freeloading behavior and Delia’s sense of ownership of her material possessions (it is her horse, not the horse or their horse).

Sykes arrives with a cruel prank: dropping the tail of the whip over Delia’s shoulder. Before she realizes what it really is, Delia is seized with a terror so strong that she cannot stand or open her dry mouth.