Mrs. Rosenthal

When I heard Mrs. Rosenthal was getting a dog, it seemed perfectly natural. She had just lost her husband, and lots of people in the neighborhood had dogs. I looked forward to making polite conversation with her about it.

But when I saw the thing, I nearly swallowed my tongue. Mrs. Rosenthal, sweet little Mrs. Rosenthal, was walking one of the most muscular, misshapen beasts I’d ever laid eyes on. Tight muzzling gear was wrapped not just around its mouth, so it could hardly breathe, but also up and down its body, so it could barely walk. Still the usual questions came out.

“What breed is it?” I heard myself asking.

“He’s a mutt,” Mrs. Rosenthal said cheerfully.

At the sound of her voice I found myself relaxing. The disturbing sight of her mummified dog and the sweet, reliable eyes of the old lady walking it felt like two different worlds. I focused on the one I was familiar with.

“You get him from the pound?”

“Yes, but the one up in Lakewood.”

“What were you doing up there?”

She shrugged. “I was taking a drive.”

There was a hum that at first I thought was the engine of an electric vehicle passing us, but I realized was a low growl coming from the bowels of her muted beast.

“Where’s Kitty?” Mrs. Rosenthal asked.

I looked up and blinked. Kitty was the name of our poodle. My daughter had come up with that name. We thought it was funny to name a dog Kitty.

“She’s at the vet,” I said, which wasn’t true. Kitty was at home, probably playing in the backyard. I felt uncomfortable telling Kitty’s whereabouts in front of this beast, as if he’d write down our address.

“Oh no! Tell her I hope she’s okay. Kitty was always such a sweet dog.”

The dense pack of muscle growled and barked through a wrapped up mouth. I swear I saw its muzzle stretch.

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” I took a step back and laughed. On one occasion Kitty had peed on Mrs. Rosenthal’s shoes. But Mrs. Rosenthal was smiling in a way that proved she’d forgotten about it. “I’ll pass it along to Kitty.”

“You do that,” she said, still smiling.

We sat there for a moment while I grasped for more small talk.

“I’m really sorry about Tom,” I blurted out. “Jenny and the kids are all broken up about it.”

“Well, I appreciate that.” She kneeled down and pet her thick beast. “If he’d had to have a heart attack somewhere, he would’ve picked Hawaii.”

“I thought it was a scuba diving accident.” I realized my mistake too late.

She looked at me. “Where’d you hear that?”

I felt my face flush. I’d heard it was a scuba diving accident from at least ten different people, but I knew I couldn’t tell her that. I remembered Margaret Carlyle specifically had said his body was horribly mutilated when it was found.

“He fell off a boat and sank like a stone. The doctors said it was likely a heart attack,” Mrs. Rosenthal smiled and waved back at a Subaru driving past. “I was there,” she added.

I had a sudden feeling that her dog was judging me from behind its mask. I looked at my shoes and stammered. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she took a breath. “I should get going.”

I gave a quick nod. “I should too.”

She passed me, waving and smiling, and I gave the dog a wide birth as I waved and smiled back.

I was in the kitchen watching a casserole bake and at first I thought the scream was the sound of the oven whistling.

When the scream continued, I went to the window and checked. My daughter was standing there, in the corner of our yard, screaming mindlessly at the ground.

“Keep it down!” was the first thing I said when I walked through the back door. I was thinking about the neighbors who’d already written us a letter about the noise.

But my daughter didn’t hear me, and as I got closer I saw why.

The thing was in multiple pieces, tendrils and organs spilling out of it like spaghetti. Flecks of brain and other chunky red stuff was flecked all along the ground, and even up and down our brand new fence.

My daughter kept screaming and I could see our neighbors watching us through their window. “Sorry!” I mouthed to them.

“Shhhh! Shhhh!” but my daughter wasn’t hearing me. I tried kicking the guts underneath the bush but the result was all the organs and eyeballs rolled out from underneath the skin and were exposed. My daughter screamed louder.

I tried picking her up but she flailed against me, slipped through my arms and I dropped her. Now her knee was scraped and she’d stepped on one of the eyeballs, popping it. The screams got louder.

Our neighbors stepped outside onto their back porch and shook their heads at me.

“I’m sorry!” I yelled to them.

“Keep it down!” the wife hissed back.

I knelt down and tried taking my daughter’s eyeball smeared shoe off her foot. She started pounding on my back.

I got the shoe off and threw it into the bush. I kicked the rest of the organs and intestines and eyeballs and brains in there too. When all that was left was bits of fur and blood and your occasional flesh chunk, her screaming turned into sobs and whimpers. Good.

Our neighbors went back inside and I relaxed.

I brought her inside and cleaned her up. Then I returned out back and fished all the guts and skin from under the bush. It was only when I had picked up the first bit of fur that I recognized it.

This thing spread all over the ground was Kitty.

I bagged her up and threw her in disposal with the contaminated shoe. I hosed down our brand new fence but no matter how much I cleaned it seemed like bits of the white paint was permanently stained.

The casserole was burned when I took it out of the oven. I sat there in the burnt smelling kitchen and watched the sun set out the window, and only then did I remember Mrs. Rosenthal’s dog. Whatever’d attacked Kitty was no coyote.

“There she is,” Margaret Carlyle whispered.

We were walking home from an elementary school auction. We were quite drunk. My wife and her husband had skipped it, so they sent us there together. Me and Margaret didn’t have much in common, but we both liked wine, so we got along.

But even through my blurred vision, the silhouette of the withered old lady and the stiff, mummified beast was quite recognizable.

“Don’t mention the stuff I told you,” I said to Margaret.

“Of course I’m going to mention it,” she whispered, just as Mrs. Rosenthal approached us.

“Hello!” Mrs. Rosenthal said in her most innocent sounding voice.

“I think it’s past all our bedtimes!” I tried my best to steer the conversation into small talk.

“Mrs. Rosenthal, do you keep a good eye on that dog at night?” Margaret had a sharp way of putting things that I didn’t like.

It took Mrs. Rosenthal a minute to realize the implications of the question. “Yes, I keep him locked up in the house. There is no doggy door.” Mrs. Rosenthal turned to me. “I’m sorry about Kitty,” she added.

“Things happen,” I said, as involuntary pictures of Kitty’s squished eyeball flashed through my mind.

Margaret pushed forward. “I don’t mean to pry, but you keep your windows shut? Nothing’s been chewed through?”

“Pry all you like!” Mrs. Rosenthal beamed at Margaret with so much positivity that Margaret had to look away. “Tom took great care to make sure he couldn’t slip outside. We replaced our screen door with a wooden one.”

“I didn’t realize you got the dog before Tom died.” Margaret was like a detective interrogator trying to catch Mrs. Rosenthal in a lie. But Margaret’s true goal was stupider: to fill out her neighborhood gossip map as fully as possible.

“I picked out the dog about a week before the heart attack.” 

I started thinking of ways to return the conversation to small talk. But Mrs. Rosenthal continued her defense. “I have never found blood on him. I’ve never seen him attack a fly.” This last sentence I found a bit hard to believe. The dog seemed ready to eat my leg if that muzzle came off.

“You’re sure?” Margaret said, accusing the elderly woman of accomplice to murder one last time.

“The only way he gets out of my house is if I let him out.” Mrs. Rosenthal said this with a surprising amount of finality, and even stomped her foot a little. It was the most aggression I’d ever seen her show. We left it at that.

As me and Margaret walked away, Margaret whispered to me.

“I don’t know why she keeps lying about Tom’s death.”

I felt annoyed. I wanted to talk about baseball or something. “She wasn’t lying, Margaret.”

“Yes, she was. His obituary said it was a scuba diving accident, and the body was only partially recovered.” I walked for a moment with this new information. “And I trust the papers,” she added.

“She’s an old lady.”

Then we reached my house: a big white house with a fresh coat of paint and all the windows dark. I waved goodnight to Margaret and went inside to find my wife and daughter already asleep. I was careful not to wake Kitty until I remembered I didn’t have to be.

My daughter suffered shakes for most of the school year. There were several times the teacher had to let her out of class so she wouldn’t cause a distraction to the other kids.

And by shakes, I mean intense shivering, like it was freezing cold. She suffered them worst right before bed.

“Shhhh, shhhh,” I’d try to calm her, tuck her hair behind her ears, but I could never get her mind off the dog.

I’d hear her even in her sleep. “Kitty, Kitty…” It made me sad. Tossing and turning was something for adults.

So that’s how I found myself holding her hand at two in the morning, going for a walk. The October cold had us both bundled up in ski jackets.

We didn’t talk much on these walks, except debating whether to turn right or left on the corners. But mostly we were lost in our own separate thoughts.

“Dad?” she asked me.

“Hm?”

She looked at me with my own brown eyes. “Why aren’t you scared?”

“Of what?”

“Of anything.”

I thought about it for a moment. I was obviously flattered. I didn’t want to deflate the compliment by telling her I was actually scared of almost everything. People, animals, work, death, even my wife and daughter sometimes.

“I’m a lot older than you,” I said. “When you get older things stop bothering you so much.”

“Is that true?”

I nodded. It is true, but the downside of it is you end up feeling less in general. But I didn’t say that either.

She smiled at me and for the first time in months I felt her little hand relax. We turned down the walkway to our house.

I glanced down the sidewalk one last time and my heart stopped. Nearly two blocks away, alternating quickly between streetlamps and darkness, there was a silhouette sprinting towards us. My daughter hadn’t seen it yet.

I stood there, frozen, and I heard my daughter say “ow,” because I was squeezing her hand too hard. The figure got closer, street lamp by street lamp, disappearing and reappearing. I squinted my eyes, trying to see in the dark.

“Margaret?” I said, finally letting my daughter’s hand go.

Margaret was in full neon Nike running gear. She was smiling wildly and kept jogging in place when she reached us.

“Hi,” she said, out of breath.

“What are you doing out here?” my daughter asked.

“I could ask you the same thing,” she laughed. “It’s way past a girl’s bedtime.”

“I’m up this late all the time.”

“No you’re not,” I said. Margaret raised an eyebrow at me and I gave my daughter’s shoulder a squeeze.

I opened my mouth to say something but the bushes rustled and my daughter screamed first, the same mindless scream from when she’d found Kitty. Instinctively I hugged her so that she screamed into my shoulder and didn’t wake up the neighbors. I didn’t see anything by the bush.

Something bristled my leg, then there was a deep grunt behind me and a gnashing of teeth, a small gasp. I turned to see Margaret collapse, holding her ear. The massive beast was already halfway down the block, going in and out of the lights.

My daughters screams kept sending vibrations through my shoulder. As a unit me and her waddled over to Margaret. She was stunned.

“Show me,” I told her, and Margaret opened her fingers up a bit. Blood came pouring out. That thing had torn her ear clean off. It must’ve leapt four feet off the ground.

“Shit,” I said, the swear word making my daughter turn and look. She let out a scream into the neighborhood which echoed up and down the block. I fumbled for my cell phone.

My wife walked outside just as the ambulance was arriving. I told her what happened and we took our daughter inside, who I’d momentarily forgot about. She’d been lying against my shoulder unmoving for fifteen minutes.

They loaded Margaret into the back on a stretcher and we watched them take her away. Margaret never made a sound or looked at any of us. She was petrified.

Then we called the cops, and told them Mrs. Rosenthal’s dog had chewed up our dog and bit a woman’s ear off.

I had a rare Saturday afternoon to myself and I was watching TV in an empty house when the door rang. Through the window I could see it was Mrs. Rosenthal with a basket of cookies, already smiling at the closed door. It’d been months since I’d seen her.

I put on my best smile and opened it.

“Morning!” I said.

“Afternoon!” she corrected me. She took a small step like she wanted to come inside, so I let her in.

She sat on the couch and I found a little armchair in the corner next to the TV.

“These are for you,” she held out the cookies and set them on the table.

“Ooh!” I picked one up and pretended to inspect it like a scientist.

She sat up straighter. “I came here to talk about the incident with my dog.”

My smile grew wider and more nervous. Since her dog was put down, I hadn’t seen her. “I hope you didn’t come here to apologize.”

“I didn’t.”

I blinked. For the first time I noticed a glaring intensity in her eyes. She was staring at me without blinking.

“You killed my dog,” she continued.

“The officers did,” I whispered.

“No. You did.”

“Mrs. Rosenthal, it bit off Margaret’s ear.”

“Margaret was awful,” she said, as if that was an answer.

I gave a short nod out of habit, for some reason pretending to agree.

“Awful. Just awful.” I noticed Mrs. Rosenthal’s hands trembling. Her face was flush red, her sagging skin jiggling ever so slightly, teeth clenched.

“I forgot to offer you water!” I stood up. “Or juice?” Without waiting for a response I walked to the kitchen and started searching through the fridge for ice cubes.

Juice, milk, eggs. Our three different bottles of ketchup. Expired Thai takeout. My own hands had started trembling. I rubbed my chest and found a stain on the fridge counter glass and was about to reach for a sponge when I felt a searing pain shoot up from my ankle.

Mrs. Rosenthal’s jaw had clamped onto my bare foot.

I screamed and tried to step on her, but her jaw clenched tighter. “Fuh you!” she snarled. “Fuh you and this whole neighb-rh-d!” I reached for a broom.

She tore a chunk out of my foot and spit it out on our clean tile floor. Then she lunged at my neck.

I reacted slowly. Half of me still felt like I was trying to entertain a guest and smashing her face would be impolite. So I let her sink her teeth into my neck.

I had this weird thought as I dropped to the ground. If I survived this, people would be talking about my neck injury for weeks. They would invent stories about what happened to me. It sounded terrible.

Mrs. Rosenthal her grin now bubbling with my own blood. She found a saucepan and raised it over her head.

“Stop,” I said, but it was weak.

“This is for the time your poodle pissed on my shoes,” she said, and then it all went black.