Sour Candy

Sour Candy

Kealan Patrick Burke

Copyright © 2015 by Kealan Patrick Burke

All rights reserved.

Cover Design by
Elderlemon
Design

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http://www.kealanpatrickburke.com

Four months to the day he first
encountered the boy at Walmart, the last of Phil Pendleton’s teeth
fell out.

1. The Scream

When the child started screaming, Phil
Pendleton had his arms loaded with chocolate bars and his
girlfriend cooing in his ear. Later he would think of the moment
prior to that klaxon-like intrusion as one of utter bliss, a rare
occasion in which his customary concerns were in
absentia.

It was a Saturday, so he was
off work and had woken up pleasurably late after a night of equally
pleasurable lovemaking. And while he had briefly considered doing
some much-delayed yardwork today (if only to stave off the
disapproving looks of his neighbors), Lori had convinced him
to
actually
take
the day off and join her in doing nothing more taxing than lounging
before the TV with a veritable stockpile of chocolate. As the
invitation had been extended while she stood in the bathroom
doorway wearing nothing but her pink silk underwear, and with the
memory of her uncharacteristic sexual abandon still fresh in his
mind, he hadn’t needed to be asked twice.

His mission was a simple one: procure
as much chocolate as possible and return home, a task which saw him
standing in the candy aisle at Walmart, Lori doling out her
requests over the phone in between bouts of sexual innuendo as he
tried to focus on the overwhelming selection on the shelves before
him.

Yes, he would have said the day was a
fine one indeed.

Then the scream had come, so
abrupt and so unexpected, Phil’s whole body jerked as if someone
had punched him between the shoulder blades. Jamie Lee Curtis had
screamed like that in
Halloween
. Loons did too. A half
dozen or so chocolate bars rained from the cradle of his arm to the
floor, smacking against his feet. Only his quick reflexes kept his
cell phone from joining it. This last was a relief. As Lori was so
fond of reminding him, he’d had to replace the phone twice this
year already due to natural clumsiness.

“
What in God’s name was
that? The fire alarm?” Lori asked. In the fright, the phone had
slipped down to his cheek. Only luck had kept it pinned there. Now,
hands unexpectedly free of candy, he grabbed it and put it back to
his ear.

“
No. Someone’s kid.” As he
said this last, he looked to his right, to the source of the
sound.

There were a half dozen or so shoppers
wandering the aisle. Many of them were making concentrated efforts
not to look at the thin woman standing midway down the aisle, or
the towheaded child currently tugging at the hem of her
unseasonably heavy coat. On the faces of the shoppers, Phil saw his
own emotions reflected back at him: irritation, pity, and
relief.

Irritation at the obnoxious
introduction of such a hostile and unwelcome sound into the general
lazy-Saturday ambience of the store.

Pity at the sight of the browbeaten
woman forced to accept responsibility for her child’s
misbehavior.

And relief that the child belonged to
someone else.

This last was particularly relevant to
Phil. Infrequent paternal impulses notwithstanding, he had never
wanted children. Indeed his first and only marriage had ended for
that very reason. Despite the agreement that they remain childless
and therefore free to live their lives untethered by such
suffocating obligations, over time his ex-wife’s position morphed
into mourning that she would never be a mother. Seeing the naked
sadness in her eyes whenever they were around the sons and
daughters of their friends, Phil had agreed to consider altering
his own stance on the subject. But his heart had never been in it.
His own childhood had been a train wreck, and rather than emerge
from that endurance test better prepared for parenthood, he
suspected it had probably ruined such prospects for life. Whatever
the case, he wasn’t in any great hurry to find out. His hope had
been that, given time, Stacey would realize the limitations a child
would impose upon their lives and bury her maternal need. She
hadn’t. Instead, her impulses bred anger and resentment toward him,
rendering him little more than an obstruction to the natural course
of her life. Even so he might have stood a chance of pleading his
case if not for the unwavering, and often openly hostile support of
her friends, few of whom had cared for him from the beginning.
Their dissolution had been a cold one, and despite halfhearted
efforts to stay in touch, they never did unless the topic was a
practical one, such as ownership of certain items discovered in the
basement of the house they’d once shared.

Now, as Phil looked at the child with
the runny nose and puffy eyes, his clothes remarkably pristine and
oddly old-fashioned, he wished Stacey were here if only so he could
use the kid as an example of why he had never conceded to her
wishes. “This,” he would tell her, “is just a taste of what we’d
have been forced to put up with.”

Aware that he was staring but unable
to stop, drawn to the sad tableau as one might be to the
interaction of animals in an enclosure, Phil moved his gaze back to
the mother and immediately felt a pulse of guilt for his
uncharitable thoughts.

“
Honey?”

“
Yeah, babe,” he said into
the phone.

“
What’s going
on?”

“
I think you can
guess.”

The woman might once have been
beautiful. All the elements were there, but appeared to have been
sullied by hardship and filtered by distress so that to find them,
one had to look harder than her appearance invited. Her dirty
blonde hair was in disarray, as if she hadn’t bothered to brush it
after getting out of bed, or had, in some fit of rage or
desperation, tried to pull it out. Or perhaps that was the child’s
doing, for in his eyes, behind the shimmering tears, Phil thought
he detected a glimmer of glee, as if nothing gave the kid greater
pleasure than the reaction his histrionics wrought from his
suffering mother. Indeed there appeared to be the slightest upward
curve at the corners of the child’s bow-shaped lips.

In contrast to her son’s rosy
complexion, the woman was pallid and drawn, cheekbones pushing
against her waxy skin like hangers beneath a sheet. The cold
fluorescents did her no favors either. She looked lost, her focus
not on the child yanking at her threadbare brown coat, but on the
riotously colorful bags of Gummi Bears, Cola Bottles, and sour
candy suspended on hooks before her. She stared as if the secret to
some elusive quandary might be hidden within. Phil estimated the
woman to be in her mid- to late forties, but suspected her Thrift
Store sense of dress, general unkemptness of her appearance, and
the obvious weathering of the child’s attention probably made her
look a decade older than she actually was.

“
That kid has a hell of a
pair of lungs on him,” Lori said.

As if he had somehow heard her, or
maybe just because his attempts to get his mother’s attention had
proved unsuccessful, the kid clenched his little fists, tilted his
head back, opened his mouth, and let loose another scream.
Throughout the aisle, people flinched, winced, and abandoned all
pretense of obliviousness to the root of the awful
sound.

“
Fuck
sake
,” exclaimed one shopper, a
heavyset man in coveralls and a dark red beard that looked like
lichen moss eager to reclaim his face. He had a six-pack of Miller
Lite in one hand. He was flexing the other. He glared, not at the
kid, but at the back of the mother’s head. Her focus on the candy
did not waver.

The kid fell silent. The slight smile
remained.

None of the shoppers left the aisle,
and now all of them were openly staring at the child and his
mother.

“
Jesus,” Lori
said.

A manager appeared.

“
I think I’ll try Giant
Eagle instead,” Phil said into the phone. “I’m actually starting to
fear I’ll go deaf.”

“
Good idea.”

But he didn’t move.

The manager, a balding man with
spectacles and bad skin, looked only marginally less stressed than
the woman to which he had been summoned. Lost inside a forest green
suit, he resembled a turtle none too enthused about coming out of
his shell.

“
What’s happening?” Lori
asked.

Again the kid looked in Phil’s
direction, and the feeling that somehow he was hearing Lori’s side
of the phone conversation intensified. But as there was at least
ten feet separating Phil from the boy and his mother, this was
highly unlikely.

“
The store manager’s on the
scene,” he told Lori, quietly.

The manager reached the woman and her
son and joined his hands together before him as if his intent was
not to chastise them but to lead them in prayer.

“
I’m sorry…Miss?”

The woman did not move. Phil’s
impression of her graduated from one of pity to concern. Given the
pallor of her skin, dazed eyes, and reluctance or inability to
move, the only thing suggesting that she wasn’t a statue was her
presence there in the middle of the candy aisle. He wondered if
maybe she’d had a stroke.

“
Miss?” The manager looked
as if he might disappear back inside his suit and scuttle away. “Do
you mind if we have a word?”

The shoppers were watching, and while
Phil found himself wishing they’d move on, he felt similarly
enthralled.