Don’t Chase by Miriam Gershow

The lost dog sign was stapled to a telephone pole, one corner flapping in the wind. Don’t chase, the sign read. Will run away, with a picture of a dog—fluffy little terrier, wet muzzle—between Don’t chase and Will run away.

“Perfect description of me,” the lady walking past thought, forgetting she’d been married for nearly twenty years, a mortgage, two children, orthodontist appointments for one, IEP for the other.

It was dry season, but the rains would come soon. She hoped the dog would be found before fall. The rain would blur the sign into watercolor nonsense. She promised herself she would would keep her eye out for the scared little terrier. At home, she forgot entirely. What she was left with was a feeling of her own cleverness, a joke she’d made about herself even if the joke was all wrong. There was no fact checker in her insides.

The dog limped home four days after it went missing, its back left paw bloody. It had been chased twice by people who had seen the dog but not the sign. It had run into traffic but a young man, quick on his feet, stomped the brakes, jerking himself forward in his seat, a good little case of whiplash trailing him into the weekend, but he was young and his body was nimble. He would be fine by Monday, but years later, he would still remember the blood rushing into his ears, the blur of white dog, and the car behind him laying on the horn, the way he had flushed with relief but indignation at being misunderstood. He was a good driver, especially for a seventeen-year-old who had doubled the cost of his parents’ insurance. He had saved that dog, and what he’d gotten was a honk. It told him something about life before he’d lived enough to know what.

“Oh baby,” the dog’s mom cried and cried as it nosed the back glass door. She had a human baby, which she suspected was the reason the dog ran away. Suddenly, the dog had become nobody to her, a fact she’d not had a moment to contemplate until the dog was gone and she was left with her chapped nipples and pain in her taint where they’d cut her and then stitched her and then pulled out the stitches, the pain either phantom or real still, it hardly mattered. Her husband had spent hours roaming the neighborhood, calling for the dog, and she hated him his hours away from home, but then sent him back out. There was no winning, he liked to say, as if it had been his taint sliced open and stitched shut.

The dog licked and licked his mom’s face, who was not his mom, of course, but his owner. The dog did not make such distinctions. It mattered not to the dog. The dog hadn’t meant to run away: an open gate, a smell of burgers never found. It had run and run and run on its stubby little legs, been growled at, hissed at, screeched at, called out to. It had slept at the base of trees. It had eaten garbage. It had gotten in a fight with a racoon, which it did not know was called a racoon. It only knew not home not home not home until a bed of lavender, a stout smoke tree, a curb cut, a Subaru wagon. It did not know Subaru wagon, obviously, unaware of the superior build of Japanese cars, the ghost towns of old Chrysler plants, the domestic automobile bailout of the late twenty tens. In all ways but one, it could not be stupider.

His poor paw. The vet held it gingerly, never not impressed by the redundancy of quadrupeds. Take one leg out of the equation, a quadruped still stood. He told the tired-faced lady and the squalling infant that it looked like two nails had been broken off. He told them it could be much worse. Almost always, it could be. The sound of the squalling infant made him grateful for his children to be 11 and 13, even if the 13-year-old liked to ask why he was “so bald” and loved only her phone. The wounded dog made him grateful for his elderly collie, Callie, who’d never once run away and was so old now, she mostly slept at his feet. He knew death was coming, death a daily part of his practice, and yet he could trick himself for hours at a time. He could call in his vet tech to tend to this dog’s paw with betadine, styptic powder and gauze, and go onto the next animal and the next, warm with the secret that Callie, no doubt, would live forever based on how much he loved her, and she him.

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MIRIAM GERSHOW — Miriam is the author of Closer (Regal House), Survival Tips: Stories (Propeller Books), and The Local News (Spiegel & Grau). Miriam’s stories appear in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. Her flash fiction appears in anthologies from Alan Squire Books, Alternating Currents, and Fractured Lit, as well as many journals, including Pithead Chapel, HAD, and Variant Lit. Her creative nonfiction is featured in Salon and Craft Literary among other journals.

Art by TRICIA SICHKO — Tricia is a Los Angeles–based illustrator who grew up in Boulder, Colorado. Self-taught, she refined her skills through study and personal projects. Early inspirations such as The Woodcutter’s Daughter and The Tale of Peter Rabbit sparked a lasting fascination with faeries, castles, secret gardens, and other fantastical worlds. Her work is defined by intricate line work, rich color and expressive characters. She begins with pencil or ink, layers in colored pencil and watercolor, and refines her illustrations digitally. Beyond the studio, Tricia is often exploring bookstores or art supply shops, always looking forward to the next rainy day.