By Pamela McHugh

Martha’s fanny pack flopped on her hip as she hooked eastward on the river pathway. The wind stung her chapped fingers as they coiled tighter around the leash handle.

Beast trotted alongside her as he always did, never pulling or lunging. Their speed was slow, and that suited both parties just fine. A speed-demon cyclist whipped past them, the bike’s back tires kicking up brittle poplar leaves. 

“Someone’s got somewhere to be,” she murmured down to her companion.

Beast broke into a prance before squatting to relieve himself. He looked away from her while he did his business.

“I knew you had to go,” she said. 

Her arthritic fingers poked around the fanny pack for a poop bag, first grazing her St. Christopher prayer card and then the pocketknife her son, Oscar, gifted her.

“Picked this up in Fukuoka for you, Mom,” he’d said, passing her a sleek black box. “For your walks.”

She smiled thinking about it. What the hell was she going to do with a $2,000 knife? Of her four children, Oscar—the oldest—was her favorite. She knew she shouldn’t play favorites, but at eighty, honesty came easy.

She crouched down, ignored her screaming knees, and clasped the coiled steamer through a bag-covered hand. The Bow River, overfed with weeks of higher-than-average September rainfall, gushed against the riverbank. Beast sniffed toward it. 

“You wanna go in there?” she asked, reaching down and scratching the dog’s chin. “You’ll get swept away like a baby duck. Crazy mutt.”

~

Six months earlier, Martha hobbled into the Humane Society and spotted Beast in the shelter’s isolation area.

“That one, I’ll take him,” she’d said. Beast barked and twitched in a caged kennel’s corner. He dug at swaths of hairless skin, scratching himself raw.

“Are you sure?” the shelter clerk asked, eyebrows nearly popping off his face. “He’s got some kind of stomach parasite.”

“Sure as hellfire,” Martha replied.

So, she adopted the old thing—a genetic smattering of God-knows-what—and he’d slept on her late husband’s pillow ever since. Her dear husband who’d spent nineteen years being slowly eaten alive by Alzheimer’s disease. 

~

Martha inhaled deeply through her nostrils. She gazed up at the brightening sky, still tinged the shade of a bruised grapefruit. The sun would be tucked behind the prairies for at least another hour. 

The pair trotted along until Martha nearly stepped on an abandoned dog turd. They stopped beneath an ash tree, its leaves already brushed with autumn’s red and gold.

“Unbelievable, Beast,” she said, prodding for another poop bag. “Nothing pisses me off like lazy idiots not picking up after themselves. What if a kid ran their bike through that mess?”

She gritted her teeth through another crouch, scoop, stand routine. She never minded cleaning up after Beast, but when she didn’t know the dog … well, it gave her the willies.

As they passed the Peace Bridge, something came into view. Something dark and rippling—a black projectile launching toward them. Martha squinted. It was a dog to be sure, but what kind? A Rottweiler? Doberman? She wasn’t any good with breeds.

A leash flapped, airborne, behind the animal. The dog’s legs whipped like blender blades on high speed. Martha’s stomach clenched and she tugged on Beast.

“Alright, Beast, this way,” she said, shuffling backward. “Come on, boy.”

She wasn’t one of those senior citizens hellbent on telling everyone about the pitfalls of aging. Did people want to hear how her hip ground with each footfall of her bunion-ridden feet? Did they want the details on her relentless hemorrhoids? No, they didn’t. 

She’d attended too many funerals—including one for her eight-year-old grandson, born with that insidious Cystic Fibrosis—to complain about getting old. But the truth was this: she couldn’t outrun what was coming at her. Maybe forty years ago she could’ve, but not today.

“Come, Beast …” she said, yanking the leash now.

The dog glanced up at his owner, confused. She never pulled on him like this. With his ears pinned back, he began an unsteady U-turn.

It was a scene set in fast forward. Suddenly, the 120-pound creature was there, its toothy jaw clamped down on Beast’s neck Pac-Man-style. Beast let out a sorrowful howl, his scrawny knees buckling as his chest hit the ground. 

Crimson-laced saliva foamed around Beast’s ears and muzzle. The assailant’s forepaws splayed on either side of Beast, pinning his convulsing body.

“Please,” she gasped. “Someone help!”

But the pathway was devoid of early morning exercisers. Passing vehicles were too distant and too infrequent. 

Martha clasped both her liver-spotted hands around Beast’s stubbly chest and pulled. The attacker snarled but didn’t let up. Beast’s howls diminished to whimpers, and the beautiful brightness in his eyes began to cloud. 

“Please, no! Let him go!”

Gleaming incisors flashed and sank into Beast’s recently regrown shoulder fur. Her best friend’s blood began to stream onto the asphalt in a thin, continuous line. A whiff of iron landed in the air: the odor of near-certain death.

Martha’s eyes shimmered as a single thought raged in her mind: Not today, this isn’t his time.

She wielded a withered arm above her head in the customary style of slasher movie baddies like Leatherface and Jason Vorhees. A guttural scream released from deep inside the octogenarian as she sunk an insanely expensive Japanese pocketknife into her adversary’s neck.

A dark geyser of gore erupted, muscle and tendons spilling from a gash so deep Martha could see the cervical vertebrae. The black dog’s jaw released, its hip wobbling before crashing onto the pathway.

“Oh, darling,” she cried, bending over her dear boy. “Come to me.”

She paid no attention to her screeching osteoarthritis as she scooped up her thirty pounds of ugly and booted it for Memorial Drive. “We’re getting help, Beast,” she huffed in his ear. “Hang on, my love.”

Martha could run. It turned out, she could run very fast.