Rosa checks her fanny pack: keys, subway pass, bottled water, and a carefully wrapped sandwich: it’s all there. Nearby, a line of pink feather boas undulates, as seven women wearing Fun Run T-shirts break into a rhyming cheer:

Who are we running for?

Who do we adore?

It’s Ginnie, Ginnie, Ginnie Moore!

Each repetition of the name is louder, and the boas are shaken higher. Wasteful enthusiasm: these women should conserve every nanowatt of energy if they want to finish the race, as sixty-year-old Rosa is planning to do. The doggerel ends with an improvised hooray as a tiny woman in a wheelchair bursts through the line. It’s tough going for the beefy man who pushes her chair, because the wheels are digging into the muddy turf.

No doubt he’s been guilted into push-duty; Rosa can read that look anywhere. Judging by his red face and the blotches of sweat on his T-shirt, she doubts he’ll finish the first mile.

Frail, bald Ginnie hunches in her wheelchair, a toothpick figure draped in new clothes. Someone, possibly the red-faced man, has chosen a sporty look for her : bold stripes on her track suit and fluorescent running shoes. Ginnie looks ready to sprint from death’s door.

Concentrate, Rosa must concentrate on the task ahead, but Ginnie wears a big grin, inescapable, like a skull that has no choice but to bare its teeth. She lifts one bony figure and gestures unsteadily at the trees, the milling crowd, then straight at Rosa, who is picking her teeth. Ginnie wheezes, “Thank. You. All.” Cheers emanate from the field. The loudspeaker booms: “Ten minutes to start time.”

“Hey, Rosa!” shouts one of the feather boa wavers.

“Oh hello! Fancy meeting you here!” Rosa says, and they air-kiss, lumpy bodies colliding and softly drawing apart.

“I’m Hilda, I volunteer—” the woman begins.

“—yes, yes, at the soup kitchen,” Rosa says. She recognizes Hilda—a woman who wears a perpetually fuddled look. She’s seen Hilda pilfer French fries from the pan of food. They all pilfer fries, but only Hilda looks ready to writhe in penitential throes over it. Although everybody’s been curbing that habit—rumors of a nasty G.I. bug making its way through the homeless community.

“Do you know Ginnie?” Hilda asks. She has a wart embedded in her eyebrow like a dog turd in tall grasses.

“Never seen her before in my life,” Rosa says, distracted by the wart.

From her years of charitable work, Rosa knows it’s not uncommon to meet a volunteer for one cause coming out to support another. But Hilda, who’s twenty years younger, makes a Big Fuss over seeing someone she knows, saying isn’t it wonderful, and aren’t there an awful lot of volunteers out today in support of a great cause. So virtuous. Yes, yes, says Rosa. Thinking: Ten minutes to start time, and I’m captured by a chatterbox.

“And isn’t it awful, the news about Methusaleh?” Hilda says, her eyes slowly filling with tears. Everyone at the soup kitchen knew the man with the waist-length white beard who refused to leave the streets for a long-term care facility.

“Oh, what news?” says Rosa. Thinking: even worse, captured by a cheerless chatterbox. She understood the nickname “Methusaleh” well enough.

“Join our team,” says Hilda, grabbing Rosa’s arm. “I’ll tell you all about—”

“Sorry—I forgot my boa,” says Rosa. “No, no! Don’t tear yours apart!” she cries when Hilda begins ripping her boa in half. “I’ll run close by, how about that?”

“Cool! Come on over here,” shouts Hilda over the loudspeaker burping up more announcements:

Everybody line up.

Walkers by the tower.

Runners at the bridge.

Everybody have a goo-ood time!

“Oh-oh,” Rosa shouts back. “Actually—I want to run! So—I’m heading to the bridge! Catch up with you later, dear!”

CRACK!

The starter pistol fires.

Rosa elbows her way through the clumps of people. Oh, those lazy walkers—with their coffees and Hummer-style strollers and picnic baskets. Seriously: picnic baskets?

She crosses the Runners’ Start Line seven minutes later. Not that anyone cares about your actual run time. After all, it’s more important to have a goo-ood time!

The course is roughly oval. On the other side of the boulevard Rosa can see the Finish Line being tugged into place, banner straightening as the guy-wires are tightened, like a spine being worked on by a chiropractor. Its grand arch is festooned with hundreds of pink balloons, and at the base, bunches of friends and family slowly assemble to applaud those who will stagger over the Finish line. Paramedics promenade around three ambulances.

1 mile

“Boobies for Brenda!” states the sign pinned to the T-shirt of the man wearing a purple clown-wig who jogs five paces ahead of Rosa. He must’ve stolen his kid’s running shorts.

Ahead of the clown-wig runs a teen-age boy and girl with the same signs. Cute, thinks Rosa, but how does Brenda feel about having her breasts mocked?

At the 1-mile signpost a gaggle of high-school kids holding the “Yay Boobies!” placard sing and cheer on the runners. Rosa recognizes he school insignia.

“Ya-aay, Western Commerce!” she shouts, pumping her fist. She volunteers for the Lovin’ Literacy program at that school. A duller, more listless bunch of students cannot be found. She stares at the placard-holders, none of whom she recognizes. This group must be the over-achievers.

She thinks of the two kids she tutors. The girl wears her hair short in the back and long in front—so long that it hangs over her eyes. How Rosa wants to yank that hair, rip it out by the roots so that scar tissue will prevent all future hair growth. The boy has a buzz-cut. He slumps on the table so that his chin rests on the book—also not conducive to reading. Twice a week Rosa cheerily offers the girl a hair clip (indignantly refused) and reminds the boy to straighten his spine (obeyed for two minutes, tops). The teens started the year at a grade 5 reading level and have sunk to grade 3.

“I simply don’t know how you get through to them,” the principal gushed to Rosa. “They are making enormous progress!”

“Oh, I try,” Rosa said. So virtuous. She kept quiet about the Oreos she secretly bribed the kids with.

Food is a tool, isn’t it? She thinks of the run ahead and pats her fanny pack. The loudspeaker booms: Everybody have a goo-ood time!

“Ya-ay Boobies!” the Western Commerce team shouts.

Blending her pleasant alto with their cry, Rosa yells, “I hate boobies!” and sprints past the clown-wig man.

2 mile

At the 2-mile signpost a five-piece jug band plays a medley of Beatles tunes. Banjo? Poor Lennon must be rolling over in his grave. Net effect is an increase in Rosa’s speed: She runs away as fast as her old-lady legs will take her.

“Hey watchit!” snarls a man as she passes. He’d slowed to a crawl, ostensibly to applaud the band. Rosa guesses he is some macho jogger who couldn’t keep the pace.

“Sooooorry!” she yells. So virtuous. Had she bumped him? She doesn’t think so.

Oh, she knows the type; she volunteered with jerks like these on her Neighborhood Action Board, NAB. He is wearing a Run cap. It is hot pink, a color men avoid like a stench. Maybe Mr. Macho figured he had something to prove. He is not about to be shown up by some old granny like her.

Her NAB is redesigning a playground. Mr. Hair-Trigger Macho, Mr. Don’t-Dare-Bump-Me, is the type to arrive late, speak at length, and oppose everything in the plan that his kid isn’t “into.”

What Rosa enjoys most is getting two of these guys going at each other. So what if nothing gets done that year on the NAB? The verbal cockfight is almost as entertaining as hockey fisticuffs.

Rosa strokes the fanny pack, and thinks of the hoagie, that delectation of fresh bun and thick butter, with crisp alfalfa sprouts and smoke-salty bacon, that lies inside. Best of all are the slices of pink honey-cured ham. Maybe she should suggest a pot-luck dinner for the Neighborhood Action Board.

Water Break

Four tables are set up with hundreds of cups of water. Rosa loves the water break at the half-way point. Not so much the water as the fact that she can grab two cups, one to throw in the general direction of her mouth, and the other, to throw on her head, which is scorching hot by now, what with the running and the sun. Best of all, she can let the cups fall on the road.

There! There! Just like that. That’s what it feels like to be a litterbug.

She relishes every second of heedlessness—letting go, not caring if a bin or bag or blue box is beneath the cup to catch it.

She pays for this annual litterbug moment with hours of sweat. Two weekends every year she hikes with the Wilderness Wanderers, armed with a three-foot spear and collection bag. The things people throw out in the bush, oh my! Most toxic to the ecosystem are the dead batteries, which leach into the soil and poison worms and thus the birds that eat them. Rosa fantasizes about kidnapping a litterbug hiker, tying him to a tree with a discarded shirt, flaying him with discarded razor blades and fishhooks, and shoving one corroding battery after another down his gullet. Sweet revenge for Mother Nature.

3 mile

“Hey lady, you okay?” a fellow runner asks as they pass the 3-mile signpost. “Your face is looking, like, purple. Pace yourself, okay?”

“Wha, me?” Rosa grimaces. “Always—” She is trying to say, “I always look like Barney on this stupid Fun Run,” but cannot catch her breath.

The young man taps her on the shoulder. She swats him away. Ah, the condescension of youth! What gives them the right.

Still, she is barely past halfway. Maybe she should drop the pace. Maybe she should lighten her load. She touches the fanny pack. Inside are her keys and phone. Both heavy. Both necessary.

Inside, too, is the hoagie, wrapped up just like any other Hoagies for the Homeless offering. She could place it beside any tramp she saw, sprawled on a park bench, sleeping it off. He would wake and discover manna from heaven.

Inside the fanny pack, too, is her water bottle. By now it weighs a ton. She will hand it to a bystander with a panting dog; that’s what she’ll do. She imagines the dog slurping the water. Dogs, unlike people, show genuine gratitude.

Before her flashes Mr. Boojums’ diminutive face, eyebrows tented, wisps of fur quivering like a telepathic dust ball tuned to the child Rosa’s frequency. Her toy schnauzer: her snuffly, high-strung, self-appointed bodyguard. The week Rosa left home for college, her parents had euthanized Mr. Boojums. “Don’t cry,” they said. “He is so pathetic. Really, it is the kind thing to do. So virtuous.”

Rosa gulps and forces herself to slow down a little. She sees a few doggy faces but not one who looks thirsty. Sometimes charitable deeds have to go undone.

The loudspeaker booms: Everybody have a goo-ood time!

4 mile

At the 4-mile signpost Rosa passes the newspaper boxes. Three of the four dailies carry headlines about Methuselah. Rosa groans, realizing Hilda will be seeing these very headlines and will no doubt pester her with more platitudes after the Fun Run. She cranes her head to look across the boulevard at the one-mile signpost at all the slow-pokes. The pink boa walkers are straggling past.

And how about that man pushing the wheelchair? His sweaty face pulses like a red beacon at the one-mile signpost. Disgusting, really, how some guys let themselves get out of shape.

Rosa speeds up. The loudspeaker booms: Everybody have a goo-ood time!

The grand arch of the Finish Line yawns ahead of her, the pink balloons clustered like froth on giant lips.

Rosa’s stride begins to wobble. Her heart pounds faster and faster. Distant thunder grows. She frowns: thunder on a sunny day? Then a lightning bolt of pain shoots along her arm. Impossible, she tells herself; I do stationary bike class and Pilates every week. This is just a Fun Run! I am not having a cardiac event.

But—what if?

What if? Far, far away, at the Finish Line, three ambulances sit like bumps on a log.

Oh no. The hoagie. She must get that hoagie as far away as possible. Fling it away? No, people would see. Make a quick detour to a waste bin?

Yes, there, ahead: garbage can on corner. She aims her feet toward it. She can do it. She must do it.

The second lightning bolt shoots along her arm. She gasps as if a knife has been stuck in her chest. Stop—stop! Her forward-bent body has a momentum of its own, a path curving away from the course and toward the garbage can. Runners divert around her, grunting with reproach. Rosa tears at her fanny pack, fumbles at the zipper.

Onward she pushes herself.

Across the boulevard a boa flutters and Ginnie Moore flashes a horrid grin. A dust-ball toy schnauzer tangles his leash around Rosa’s ankle, causing her to tumble.

Her heart is now a big flaccid bag, filling with blood, filling, filling, unable to propel the contents out. The sky is growing dim—why had no one warned her there would be an eclipse today of all days? The sounds are growing dim—did she forget and leave in her earplugs, today of all days? And still—the hoagie lies in the pouch. Looking innocuous. Seething with botulinum. Perhaps no one would think of doing an analysis… but that Methuselah case is attracting so much attention… and the new director of city health is a real bloodhound, isn’t he?

Rosa groans. It’s hard to accept that from now on everybody will look at her differently.

THE END