I saw a black dog in an alley, its ribs protruding from its stomach like knuckles. Its nails were long and curled like smoke, its white eyes foggy. Despite its inability to see, it bared its teeth as I passed, rotten spires of crumbling wood over graves. Walking faster, I tried to convince myself that it was imagined-- the stray who could not see and who stood in one of the many alleyways of my city, snarling at my feet as if they were torches sent to chase it down the mountain and burn its trail into paw print cinders.
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The war, I think, had not begun until my sixth birthday, but my aunt told me that it began long before I, or she, was born. Back when we lived on fields, instead of rock. When the sky was considered steep and the land flat, when there was an abundance of wood and green was everywhere. I cannot imagine a world like that, and now it is a decade since the beginning, and I know that my aunt was wrong because I remember that I was six when the first group of wood traders did not come; when the city braced itself for the starvation, the cold, and all the the evils that run with those ghosts; when I saw the black dog. It was October, and the flies were beginning to seep into the clouds, or the ground, or wherever they went for eight months of the year. It was fall, and we held our breaths for the drenching, cleansing rains to pounce onto the backs of our parched afternoons. It was the end, and we had watched for it with the eyes of a black dog.
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  I never saw that dog again, but I see its hungry mouth and wary, skittish paws everywhere, as if it were dropped into the moss and then grown over with a possessive sweep of rooting fingers. Everyone is a little tense, a little scared, and a little angry, and some more than most. We are all desperate for the day’s we’ve forgotten, the weeks that we’ve mourned, the years that we’ve lost. We want the dead back and when they don’t return we want those we fought dead too. Reason is too civilized for the wrecked terraced cities we inhabit, logic as cracked and scratched as the masonry of streets-turned-battlegrounds. I don’t try to convince anyone otherwise-- I can barely convince myself-- but somewhere in the Lowlands, in the fields where the sky is steep, the lands are flat, and the trees are abundant, I think there exist black dogs too. Kindness is not found in the soles of marching feet, whether they be headed up to the mountains or down to the basins. Somewhere in the Lowlands there is someone who hates more and someone who hates less, and somewhere in me there is a black dog too.
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I saw a black dog in a mirror, its ribs protruding from its stomach like knuckles. Its nails were long and curled like smoke, its white eyes foggy. Despite its inability to see, it bared its teeth as I smiled, and I felt air on my gums. It never was imagined because I saw it in the militias who were sent with torches down the mountain to burn the people in the hills and I saw it in the people in the hills when, smoldering, they brought the smoke back to us. We walk in the puddles of drenched November afternoons, ten years after the beginning, and we leave paw prints as dark as ash on the stone.