By Eva Dias Costa in Signals — 19 Jul 2025

#24. Canine Anomalies, Filed.

The paperwork never matches.
The names are always “wrong.”

At the park, someone calls out: Rex?
And I think,
What a heavy thing to name a dog.

Doof once ignored a priest.
Sig grabbed a philosopher’s sleeve.
They say I bit a nun at school.

We’re not misbehaved.
We’re misread.

Sometimes I wonder what will happen
when we’re gone
and someone else finds the tags.

Hund Doofenshmirtz. Sigmund de Barros.

Too long for urns. Too strange for sympathy cards.

Still: they fit.
Because I didn’t choose their names,
I located them.
Like longitude.
Or a lock already shaped to the key.

You can live your whole life
responding to the wrong name
and still die
exactly yourself.

🗂 Appears in:
→ Signals (for emotional truth delivered through surreal logic)
→ Other Minds (for the question of nonhuman subjectivity and the ethics of naming across species)