“Oblivious” by Dawn Abeita

A short story by alum Dawn Abeita (fiction, ’96) appears at the Cortland Review:

The day before my mother died our dog, Oblivious, hid under her bed. She was under there an afternoon, a night, and a morning when my mother made it worse by lying on the floor and handfeeding it bits of leftover hamburger. “When she gets hungry, she’ll come out,” I said. Several times. My mother did not believe she should listen to a twelve-year-old, only vice versa.

“What’s gotten into her?” she asked. She was the one who named the dog.

I said, “Now she’s going to poop under the bed. You’ll have to move the bed to clean it up.”

“You don’t know everything,” my mom said. “Don’t you have homework?”

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