Anna

Illustration: Ansellia Kulikku.

To think that, until the dogs’ appearance, everything had been going fine.

She’d left home when it was still dark. From time to time she was forced to go further afield in search of food. Previously it had been easy: you only had to go to Castellammare and you found what you wanted. But the fires had complicated everything. She’d been walking for three hours under the sun as it rose in a pale cloudless sky. The summer was long past, but the heat wouldn’t let up. The wind, after starting the fire, had vanished, as if this part of creation no longer held any interest for it.

In a garden centre, next to a crater left by the explosion of a petrol pump, she’d found a crate full of food under some dusty tarpaulins.

In her rucksack she had six cans of Cirio beans, four cans of Graziella tomatoes, a bottle of Amaro Lucano, a large tube of Nestlé condensed milk, a bag of rusks, which were broken, but would still make a good meal soaked in water, and a half-kilo vacuum pack of pancetta. She hadn’t been