A Dog Named Craig
Minneapolis, Minn. — Your neighbor bursts through your front door, stumbles about the house to wherever you are, and falls to the floor, just a few feet away from your feet. She—yes, she is a she—is short of breath. She is injured. She has been shot in the abdomen. The blow is fatal, and you both know she will die in minutes.
A dog runs in after her and jumps up at your waist, pawing at your mid-section. During your neighbor's last minutes, the two of you take turns petting the dog.
"What's its name?" you ask.
"Just picked it up from the pound," she says. "Doesn't have one."
Your neighbor dies.
The whole scenario is bizarre. No one's overlooking that. The very minute your neighbor returns from the pound with a brand new dog, without even having enough time to lock her car with her remote, someone shoots her in the abdomen, and she dies. But not before stumbling through your door, and collapsing just a few feet away from your feet. Bizarre. But, you know what you must do.
You call the police, the paramedics, her family (in that order), and that night you are interviewed by several local news outlets. You are not a suspect. No one is. Whichever hands were responsible for your neighbor’s death will not be cuffed today (or ever, c’est la vie). Throughout the investigation and the interviews, you are cooperative and appear calm and articulate. Given the circumstances, you are. But for some reason, some inexplicable reason, you never tell anyone about the dog, and no one asks. They assume the dog is your dog and always has been, and you let them. The dog doesn't seem mussed by the discrepancy either. So the dog becomes your dog, as if it always were your dog.
Weeks go by, then months. A year passes.
Finally, one night, with no one around, you confront the one detail left unsettled about your neighbor's death: What do you name the dog?
- Michael Garberich
[Disclosure: a dog named craig is the name of Dislocate intern Michael Garberich's blog, which is his mildly obsessive, occasionally compulsive approach to experiencing the newspaper and other publications.]