Image by permission of Kevin Coyne © 2012
Cover design by M. Anne Sweet and Sabrina Sun
From the Opening: © 2012 by Jack Remick
The year the war ended, Gabriela led her sick Mother out of Tepeñixtlahuaca. The bones of the villagers still had meat on them then and the hearths still had fire in them but the retreating soldiers had chased away the skinny dogs and burned the houses. In the jungle the murdered bodies of young women lay rotting. The young men had become soldiers and had, in their own time, committed atrocities.
And from the Ending:
And when Nando was gone and the village was quiet, the skinny dogs waddled up out of the gash in the earth and their jaws were red with blood and tangles of meat and skin clung to their teeth and they squatted before Gabriela licking their paws and, had they been human, she would have seen happiness in their eyes.