The Dog Read Free Page B

Then he shouted, “Go,” and the dog was off again.
    Li Yan saw that even though the dog’s eyes were wild with terror, it obeyed. It was clear that Zheng took a sporting pride in his control of the animal, but Li Yan watched her husband’s face as the dog ran, and knew he was unprepared for this. She knew her husband, and she knew what he was feeling.
    Eventually the animal got tired. Its jukes became predictable, its speed was sapped, and it cowered against a corner of the wall, fangs bared, sleek hair spiked the length of its spine. The band of children closed in.
    â€œDon’t go any closer,” Zheng said. “We’ll take over.” He punctuated this declaration with a slap to Chen Wei’s back, and walked toward the children, who scattered, squealing in mock horror as he swung the knife above their heads. “Come on,” he said to Chen Wei. They bore down upon the dog together, their knives raised. The dog snarled. Spittle dripped from its muzzle.
    â€œSit,” Zheng said. The dog sat.
    Li Yan couldn’t bear to watch any longer. She leapt from the doorway and forced her way through the children.
    â€œStop,” she shouted. “Stop.” She was waving her arms over her head.
    Zheng turned toward her, his butcher knife still raised, and to someone watching from beyond the fence it might have appeared that he meant to threaten Li Yan’s life. But she moved forward, unafraid, until she stood between the two men and the dog. Her husband lowered his knife and hooked his thumbs through his belt loops. He tried to slouch like a gunfighter.
    â€œI should have known,” Zheng said.
    Li Yan said nothing.
    â€œMove over,” Zheng said.
    â€œI’m sorry, Chen Wei,” she said, but she did not move.
    â€œChen Wei, tell your wife to stand aside,” Zheng said. The aunties gathered at the edge of the house looked amused. They pinched at each other’s sides, and some chuckled under their breath.
    Chen Wei shook his head, but he was unable to affect his detached pose while looking his cousin in the eye, so he found a point in the distance and focused.
    Zheng scanned the faces ringing the yard. The children were watching him. The aunties were watching him. The uncles were watching him.
    He made a fist. “Don’t make me use this,” Zheng said to Li Yan. She closed her eyes and presented her chin.
    Chen Wei dropped his knife. He drew up his shoulders and moved between his wife and Zheng.
    Though Chen Wei wasn’t steady on his feet, his palm fell on Zheng’s cheek with all the delicacy of a lover’s touch. He patted his cousin’s rough face. The aunties all got very quiet. There wasn’t much they hadn’t seen before, and when Chen Wei drew his hand away, they each tensed imperceptibly. Chen Wei turned his slight shoulders to the side, coiling, and brought the back of his hand across Zheng’s face with such force that Zheng, twice his size, staggered back a step.
    Chen Wei’s hand hovered in the dead air between them.
    â€œHa,” Zheng said. “Ha!” A wide smile split his face. “Good one,” he said.
    If there were terrestrial sounds in the world at that moment, a swallow crying for its mate or a breeze pushing through the grass, they were absorbed into the wake of silence radiating from his voice. For a moment it seemed to Li Yan that the rotation of the earth had locked, that the natural world was pinned like a butterfly to a cardboard frame. She felt the silence enveloping her, the two men, the family, the village, and extending outward like a shadow until it seemed that the entire world was somehow flattened against itself, dark. It was this oppressive airlessness, the locus of suffocation within her own body, that caused Li Yan, desperate to set the world once again in motion, to speak.
    â€œYou idiot,” she said to her husband. She may as well have clubbed him with a length of pipe.