Maya moved fast, her hands steady. She crouched, wedged her foot beside the fence for balance, and pressed one hand against the wet slats, pushing them apart. With her other hand, she reached forward and gently pulled the dog’s leg out, one careful motion at a time.
As the dog’s leg slipped free, Maya lost her footing. Her heel sank into the soft ground, and before she could catch herself, she tumbled backward with a muffled grunt. Her poncho hit the mud with a slap.
She scrambled upright, gripping the fence with one glove, heart hammering. Her knees throbbed from the fall, but she forced herself up, casting a wary glance toward the dog. Was it going to lunge? Bite? Maya was ready for an aggressive reaction, but what the dog did next brought tears to her eyes….
Maya was seventy-two, stubbornly independent, and perfectly content living alone in her weathered little house at the edge of town. The neighbors called it “quaint”—and it was, with ivy on the porch railings and mismatched flower pots she refused to replace. Everything inside had a place, and she liked it that way.
That morning, the kitchen smelled faintly of toast and marmalade. The sky outside was gloomy, the kind of gray that made the trees look flatter and the roads quieter. Maya moved about in her slippers, humming without realizing it, frying a single egg in the pan as rain threatened in the distance.
The alert came just after breakfast. Maya was rinsing her cup when the television interrupted itself with a loud emergency tone. “Severe thunderstorms approaching the region within a few hours” A few seconds later, her phone lit up with the same message, followed by a mechanical voice from the kitchen radio.
She moved quickly. For someone her age, anyway. At seventy, Maya wasn’t fast, but she was focused. She shuffled to the pantry and began collecting supplies—snacks, bottles of water, two apples—and carried them down to the basement in small batches. The wind outside had already started to whistle faintly.