The Burial Samantha Xiao Cody (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by saiberiac [End Page 84] In the days after Mr. Huang was arrested for killing his son, we began seeing the dog everywhere. The Huang house was swarmed with reporters and curious passersby, but every time we crept near, we were swatted away and scolded for being nosy by one of the lao nai nais who were always standing there, soaking up information like sponges. The Huang house stayed silent, the shutters drawn, but we were sure Mrs. Huang was still inside. "I can't even imagine," our mothers whispered, shaking their heads. Some of our mothers, like Eddie's ma, made food and left it out on the back lawn of the Huang house in the afternoons, and though we never saw Mrs. Huang emerge, the dishes were always back out on the lawn in the morning, empty and clean. [End Page 85] We first saw the dog standing near the storm drain at the end of the street. It was skinny, gray, some kind of mutt. It wasn't a cute dog, or at least, we wouldn't say so. We saw it in the late afternoon, just before we'd have to part ways and go home, when the sunlight was slanting nearly horizontal, a wide, deep gold, casting long shadows like ghostly roads across lawns and house fronts. The dog's shadow reached toward us, stretching down the asphalt. We stared at the dog, and it stared at us, before it slunk off into the scraggly bushes beside the road. We shivered. Summer was ending. ________ Of course, we now spent almost all our time imagining what had happened within the walls of the Huang house that night Marvin Huang had died. The adults around us talked about Mr. Huang, what they remembered of him. "I remember he was always nervous," our mothers whispered. "Always stressed about something, always scared of losing face. I remember when his card was declined at the grocery store and he turned red and ran out, leaving all his food there on the belt," they said. "I remember when his wife wore that dress to the talent show at school, you know the one, the one that was too young for her, and when he saw us looking and he realized, he grabbed her and Marvin and put them right back in the car," they said. "I remember when he lost his job and refused to tell anyone, but we all knew because Marvin was going to school in those clothes that were too small and too old," they said. "And, you know. There were the rumors, that Mr. Huang sometimes got a little angry, sometimes filled up his hands with that anger." When Marvin came up, the adults fell silent. During our summer holidays, we gathered every day in the woods behind the sagging neighborhood park on the bank of the lethargic creek that slipped through the trees behind our houses. Everything about our neighborhood looked tired, from the playground to the trees to the creek to the narrow one-story houses to the mothers coming home from their shifts as nurses, waitresses, salon workers. But there was some magic to our little creek and woods, especially in the summer. The water became swollen with sunlight, blinding flakes of it dancing on the surface. The tree leaves glowed a translucent, veiny green. Sometimes we had to ignore the Styrofoam floating on the water or the cigarette butts thrown onto the dirt, but it was more than good enough for us. "Mr. Huang must have gone crazy," Kevin said. "He must've snapped and stabbed Marvin with a kitchen knife." [End Page 86] Kevin was the coolest of all of us. He was the one the Black and Latino and white boys joked around with at school, the one who knew all the new shows and the best music, the only one of us whom girls talked to, with his above-average height and his handsome, angular face. He was the only one of us who would sometimes skip school, or drink or sneak out at night...
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Apr 1, 2021
Rick Cousins 
Open Access