Golden Age Marathon

In a small town lived a ten-year old boy named Timothy, who spent most of his free time hanging around at home. One Sunday, while brooding in his bedroom, he walked over to a window and leaned against its frame. His eyes drifted from the front lawn below to the street beyond. Timothy noticed that a pedestrian was walking around the curve in front of his house. With a bolt of shock, he realized that it was Mrs. Brown. The boy forced himself to remain calm. If all went well, the woman would amble by and everything would be fine. Unfortunately, his mother happened to be standing outside, smoking a cigarette, her back against the porch.

'Good afternoon, Mrs. Brown,' she called out.

The pedestrian stopped in her tracks and, after a short pause, decided to walk over for a chat. Timothy acted in a panic. He ran to a closet and grabbed the first large object he could find, which was a vacuum cleaner. With trembling hands, the boy scrambled to open his window. Before Timothy knew it, he had thrown the appliance at the woman and missed her by a squirrel's hop. The object smashed on the ground, with a loud bang. Mrs. Brown screamed and looked up, straight at him, her eyes full of rage and disbelief. The boy did not manage to hold her gaze and looked down at the gigantic wreckage, scattered across the tiles and the freshly mown lawn. He wondered whether all vacuum cleaners contained so many mechanical parts. Until then, Timothy had been sure that their plastic shells comprised no more than a fan, some dust and a wisp of foul air. Meanwhile, his mother was gazing at the sky, still holding her cigarette, as if the object had fallen from a plane.

Mrs. Brown was a writer and a mother. She used to be very prolific, delivering books and babies with the efficiency of an industrial production plant. Her last child was born soon after she turned forty-three. Two years later, her book output came to a halt as well. Mrs. Brown had become a minor celebrity at the age of thirty-five, thanks to a compilation of poems that received a vast amount of media attention. At the height of her fame, Mrs. Brown appeared on television and signed books in prestigious places. Many years had since passed, but she was still regarded as a star in their small town. Everybody kept saying how great her poems were, even though nobody understood them.

Mrs. Brown looked disarmingly normal. She did not wear eccentric clothes, did not gawk at people through oversized glasses and did not dye her hair fuchsia. The woman's only striking feature was her pen name, Fat Frieda and the Tigers from Hell. According to many, her name choice would have been more adequate for an eccentric rock band. Besides writing poems, Mrs. Brown also authored romantic novels, in which young and beautiful women fell in love with real estate agents, plumbers and swimming instructors. Last but not least, she wrote a series of cookbooks. These had been published with her real name on the front and her picture at the back. Sometimes, Timothy picked one of them from his mother's shelf and gazed at the woman's portrait. A much younger Mrs. Brown stared back, wearing a maroon cardigan and holding a large saucepan.

***

Most clubs and associations in the vicinity were presided by the notorious Mrs. Brown, including the senior running group. Twice a week, a tight pack of balding men and gray-haired women tottered through the small town streets. Once a year, they organized an open-to-all event called the Golden Age Marathon. Of course, it was much shorter than a real marathon, or else most of the group's older members would have died from exhaustion or heart failure. The race could not even be labeled as a serious sporting activity since all who lived in the town were allowed to participate, regardless of their physical conditions. In Timothy's opinion, the event was nothing more than an idiotic jogging-down-the-main-street act, during which grandparents ran with prams and weirdoes wobbled in fruit costumes.

The reason why Timothy hated and feared Mrs. Brown had nothing to do with her writings; it was because of her senior running group. He believed that while most of the woman's clubs and associations were what they claimed to be – a bunch of people who met every now and then to share experiences about gardening, cooking or kite flying – that one was not. It was a cover-up for something else, far more nefarious. The boy was convinced that Mrs. Brown and her senior citizen cronies ran the town streets for the sole purpose of stealing kids and eating them.