Candy

A once a year vice, candy shopping is like making a down payment on a cavity. Or two. But I do it anyway, in an anticipatory sugar high. I try a couple, staring right into the eye of a distant dismal security camera, and thereon into the eye of a distant dismal security man, and almost felinely pocket the noisy wrappers like nothing happened. The most colorful ones are always brown on the inside. Disappointing. I tongue the behinds and fronts of my teeth but they’re stained for good. I smile back into the camera, posing for the security man’s picture, brown. Trick or treat.

Home, I wait. Infinitely, as the little pitter patter of sweet-blooded kids around the neighborhood wrench like candy-cane crowbars at the insides of my non-existent uterus. I stare at the doorbell, and almost see it ring, every time I hear the crunchy leaves splinter into a thousand orange bits of fall. Like gored pumpkin guts.

I turn and flap the blinds open to nothing but the night.

I sweep the floor off its mosaic of colorful wrapping paper and swear to never buy candy again, as I reach for a handful of Skittles and wonder if the green ones taste like apples, and the red ones of blood. The expected adrenaline thumps down my throat, as they both dissolve and taste like sugar. Again.

I still blame the solitary flap of fatty milk chocolate, hanging by my left belly, precariously undecided on whether to sit inside or outside my pants on the kids that never came.