I had found the park on a bicycle ride with a friend. The isolated location appealed to me; it was on the edge of the city against the mountains. Decades ago, it had been a quarry which fueled the city’s growing infrastructure. One end of the park stopped at a busy two-lane road. The other jutted against the mountains. If you looked hard enough, you could see evidence of the quarrying company. There were discolored cement huts and mysterious cement pillars and fortifications. The pillars’ alignment created a sluice to transport loose gravel to a collection point. The small cement huts were the remains of single-family dwellings that the quarry company provided for workers after the war. The economy was different then and things that today would make no sense made perfect economic sense back then. I liked the park because it was uncrowded, quiet, and spacious. My dog, Lady, and I ran there at night. There were very few people there at night. There were no streetlights, so it was as dark as the moon was full. This was before they moved the train underground and we could hear it sometimes as it travelled north to Tainan. I wasn’t much of a runner and am less of one now. However, if you can live in a foreign country and can find a quiet place to be comfortably alone, you are no longer in a foreign place. Although I did not think this then, I know it now. It was why we frequented that park; to feel at home in a place we felt otherwise. The night I’m talking about was Friday, May 17. We were on our last lap. Crossing the busy road opposite the tracks I noticed Lady was not beside me as she usually was and at the same time I heard a child crying. It was a subtle thing. I wasn’t startled and I didn’t have gooseflesh popping up and the hair at the back of my neck didn’t rise. I slowed and then stopped and took a second to breathe before I called for Lady. At the same time, I became more aware of the child crying. Now, I realized it was a boy crying. I looked around as I caught my breathe and saw him squatting at one of those oval, off colored cement pieces that dotted the park. You could tell that the cement was old because it was more porous than modern cement the city used to build the new canal. Lady still hadn’t appeared, but I wasn’t worried. More than once we’d been separated but we always found each other. One time, during the Lunar New Year when people were still allowed to BarBQ in public, we had been separated because she was afraid of fireworks. I had been scared when I couldn’t find her. I’m too jaded to feel that way now, but back then I was wrecked. I had looked for hours until an old neighbor called me and told me Lady had turned up at our old place. Anyway, I slowly approached the kid and asked if was okay in Chinese. “Ni, okay ma?” “Wo yao wei jia. Wo jr yao wei jia.” Okay. Mei wenti. Ni tzu zai na li?” The kid pointed in the direction I was going, so I said I’d take him home. After that he stood up and we started walking. I guess he was afraid of the dark, and probably scared for being alone for so long, because he reached up for my hand. He must have been outside for a bit because his hand was cold. I didn’t recognize his school uniform. There was Japanese writing on it, too, which I thought was weird. My brother found a cat mummified under his house once and that’s what the kid smelled like. I heard Lady howling, but she seemed far away. The cylindrical brick buildings turned out to be crematoriums. That’s where the kid was taking me. When I tried to let go of his hand he held me tighter. I was probably out of breath from running earlier because he just gripped me harder and I couldn’t do anything. I thought I heard a wolf howling, but it was Lady. When I woke up in the ambulance, she was still with me. They wouldn’t let a dog in an ambulance now.
