[ WP ] Share an excerpt from a story you 've been writing in your head

I saw my first dead body when I was just twelve years old. 
 
 Every summer, my parents would send me to my homeland of China to visit relatives. These visits became less and less frequent as I grew older, but they would continue to insist that I go regardless of my age.'Family should stick together', my mother said to me, when I asked for the purpose of these lengthy and faraway trips. It was not so bad. Of course, none of my relatives had anything interesting to say. They would ask about my studies and gawk at how tall I was or how I had grown. The conversations with my uncles and aunts were mostly one-sided. 
 
 What made the visits bearable was China herself. I had grown up in suburban America and the Chinese countryside was remarkable to me in how different it was. All of the little houses that looked so similar yet not, the nearby city that was so crowded and lively, even the smell of manure drafting through my closed window in the morning. It was all very exciting for twelve year old me. My wanderlust would fade as I matured and settled into a mundane office job where I was more concerned with paying bills then with exploring exotic faraway countries, but for those few years in my childhood, I was captivated. 
 
 I would spend many mornings just taking a walk around town, listening in on other people's conversations and trying to expand my infantile understanding of the mandarin language by making small talk with street vendors. There was a forest near to where I lived, one that grew around a hill, with little dirt roads leading from the town into the forest and up the hill. This was where I saw the corpse. 
 
 There was one part of the forest that was quieter than the other parts. It was not the peaceful, serene silence broken periodically by the chirping of birds or the barking of a wild dog. The lack of sound was eerie and pervasive. I'm not sure whether it's because the ground in other places was too marshy and difficult to dig in or maybe it was the expense in interring your dead in the local graveyards, but this part of the forest was where they kept the graves. Dozens of them. 
 
 It was my grandfather who told me about the place. He was a solemn and brooding old man who did not speak much. He noticed me meandering through the forest one morning and direct me down a crooked dirt path that wound down the hill. It was only wide enough for one person, a path that seemed to be formed from thousands of feet stomping the ground down over the course of years with stone steps added in as an after-thought. He lead me down the path, telling me to keep watch for the jagged rocks and gnarled roots that were liable to trip you, and pointed to one of the graves. That was where his wife, my grandmother, was buried. Typhoid fever, apparantly. 
 
 I usually kept away from the makeshift graveyard, the atmosphere was unsettling. Occasionally my curiosity would win over my fear and I would hazard a brief visit. Sometimes there were new freshly dug graves, but I had never seen anyone else visiting. No mourners or widows dragging along their kids to visit one of the departed. 
 
 Often, I would just sit there, draped in the light of the rising sun as it shone through the thick foliage, making peculiar patterns on the ground as it pierced the canopy. Nothing but the silence and the tress and their leaves and branches swaying in the light breeze. And the stone markers that indicated where the dead bodies laid. Those stone markers were nameless, despite being well cared for. Sometimes I would see paper lanterns, just hanging on the branches or laid on top the graves. I did not see who lit them. 
 
 I'm rambling, are n't I? You want to hear about the corpse. The one that was n't buried. He had soft, pallid eyes with a thin angular face. He was gaunt and pale, thought that might've just been a side-effect of dying. The dead man wore thin, patchy clothing and baggy jeans with a ragged, threadbare green jacket. His neck was bent at a unnatural angle. He swayed with the paper lanterns and the leaves when the wind blew on him, his body being carried by the rope that tied his neck to the tree branch. 
 
 He hovered over the graves, like an angry apparition. 
 
 If I was a good storyteller, I would tell you more about him. I would tell you his name, Tain Hsing, who lived in a one room apartment with a leaky roof and unbearable neighbors and worked on a factory line making ice cone machines. Tain Hsing, who owned a fat, fluffball of a cat that he adopted as a stray when he found it, skulking under an empty oil barrel. A man who would tell the most outrageous stories when drunk. His friends would laugh with him, even as they waved away his absurd fantasies. I would tell you the story of a man who was well loved despite his great many faults. 
 
 I would tell you the story of how his wife fell to a disease that could not be cured on the wage of a factory worker, no matter how hard he tried. Tain Hsing wept even when his wife forgave him. In fact, she never blamed him in the first place. She continued to love him untill her last dying breath. Tain Hsing became inconsolable after she left. He dug a grave in the forest, being too poor and indebted from all those treatments to afford a spot in the local graveyard or a proper casket. Then he hang himself, not five feet above where the body of his dead wife laid. 
 
 I want to tell you that this man was well loved, that someone out there would miss him. I ca n't, because I do n't know. This man died with a whisper. No one came to claim his body. He did n't show up in the newspaper. There was no evidence to prove that anyone ever loved him. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

