I walk Tango at the off-leash park near our house. My walking routine overlaps the neighbors’. Moms stroll babies, pairs of silver haired ladies walk poodles or spaniels or kind yellow labs. My routine overlaps the Canada Post worker, delivering.
It overlaps pissing Frank.
I call him Frank because I’m certain he’s Italian, that his real name must be Francesco. I don’t know his wife’s name, but I imagine it reeks of catholicism. Magdalena perhaps, or Madonna. She is easily eleven inches taller than Frank, and much more vigorous. She wears her skirts below the knee, pulls her hair into a bun so tight it flattens the skin near her eyes, walks like there is a yardstick taped to her spine.
Every afternoon at 1:45, she opens the front door, shoos Frank onto the porch like a cat.
Frank’s well dressed. Always in the plaid British racing cap and blue melton jacket, sturdy shoes with leather soles. Magdalena checks him at the door before she lets him in public, flattens his collar.
As Tango walks, he stops to pee on every light post. Frank too. They each mark the green standards that line the off-leash park. Tango leaves a vigorous squirt and a scent. Frank, the victim of a tired prostate, leaves a thin, dark line.
Frank’s actually in the process of undoing his fly when the cougar takes him down.
She leaps from the scrub brush the borders the park, bolts across the short grass, and latches onto Frank’s right calf. It’s a meaty part of a man, even a small man like Frank.
She pulls him to the ground, drags him several feet before she separates most of Frank from the piece she wants. She’s a xylophone of ribs, her nipples are dark and swollen to finger size – a litter of pup waits in a den somewhere, desperate to drain her. She glides away, a half-pound of dripping Frank and a swatch of fine flannel clenched in bloody teeth.
I run to Frank. There is so much blood I can smell it. Frank is staring at the part of his leg that is no longer there. “That,” he says through thin lips, “ is one piece of me that woman is no gonna get.” Then he smiles.
I call 9-1-1 and hope for the best.
Frank doesn’t walk now. Instead, every day at 1:45, Magdalena, in thick hose and low-heel black shoes, pushes him in a wheelchair…the same route Francesco once walked, along the line of light posts.
Seated now, Frank’s eyes are even with the dark, dry lines of past pissing. He tucks his hands under the wool blanket on his lap. He smiles and nods at every long, thin stain, the narrow rills of a thousand small rebellions.
Kari Strutt’s short fiction has appeared in Event, FREEFALL, Grain, Prairie Fire, and Room. In addition, an excerpt from her novel in progress appears in Freshwater Pearls, and a creative non-fiction piece is included the anthology, Embedded on the Home Front. “As Regards the Ashes of Peter”, another CNF piece appears in Prism International (51.4).
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