The wet snoot brushed against the back of his weathered hand. Leathery skin, loose, veiny, and spotted from years in the sun picking whatever happened to be in season. The cool wet snoot felt soothing, but his dog had died years before.
“¿De quién sos? Whose are you?”
He squatted down to face level with the four-legged stranger. “Are you lost?”
The eyes were gold, sprinkled with glints of jagged obsidian. They stared into the man’s own haggard brown orbs, half-closed from a lifetime battling the glare of the sun in fields and farms from one end of the continent to the other.
“You know, you really do look a lot like my girl,” he said. He leaned in and kissed the top of her mohawked head. She was a beautiful Xoloitzcuintle, charcoal and hairless save for that white strip atop her skull. “Her name was Lucia. What’s yours?”
The dog stared. No head tilt, no flinch, her gold eyes boring straight into the old man’s.
“Okay then, vámonos,” he said, standing up. He looked around and realized, for the first time, that he had no idea where the hell he actually was.
He felt the cold snoot in his hand again. He looked down.
“You have any idea where we are, girl?”
She didn’t say much, but she turned and walked in… well, he couldn’t tell what direction she was walking. There were no landmarks to help him get his bearings. No sun in the sky to mark the time of day or give him a sense of east and west. No moon or stars to guide him. It was bright as the golden hour, but there was nothing to show where the light came from. It had the effect of perpetually feeling like it was getting dark. In every direction, everything was just a different shade of black: the rocks, the road, the jagged—not hills exactly—just shapes in the distance.
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