'Yeah, I dunno why she called him that, there’s a bunch of stuff I can’t ask her now' by Jane O'Sullivan

We get needle tornadoes here, like bzzzt finger of god. My sister got done, sucked right up into the eye. Now her dog follows me everywhere, and every day I see the same sad brown eyes, the same sad brown thought: Why not you? Dunno, dog. I dunno, but it wasn’t.  

One morning he licks my hand because I’ve slept late again and it’s a different thought there in his eyes: Go get her.  

Jesus, mate. I can’t. She’s gone.

Get her. I miss her.

So I get out of bed and dump some biscuits in his shiny new bowl and I dunno what he wants me to do after that so we drive around a bit. I wind down the windows and point up into the sky. See? But he doesn’t see. He’s a dog. Then the sirens go and just as I’ve almost got us to the shelter, he squeezes out the window and splats out the car. Then it’s here-a-honk there-a-honk as the brown idiot races straight across the road and onto the soccer pitch. The big, wide, flat-as-fuck soccer field. And then he just stops.  

Harry Carrington the Third you get back here, I yell. But the sky is crackling now, those whipper-wools starting to reach, and he don’t hear me. That’s what I tell myself as I get out of the car. The wind. He just can’t hear me.  

I run, my hair proper whipping my face, but the oval is so big and the whipper-wools are fingering now and he still can’t hear me.  

Harry-Carry!

Finally he turns. Those eyes. Now? We get her now? And I fall on him, and press that dumb brown fur into the grass, and we wait like that, all tangled, to see if we get took.