Sour Candy (2 page)

“
Miss?”

The kid spun on a heel to face the
manager. For a brief moment, he just smiled at the man, but just
when the manager started to return it, encouraged perhaps by any
acknowledgment at all, the kid screamed a third time. Startled,
eyes bugging from their sockets, the manager staggered backward and
almost collided with an old woman who had been watching, her
gnarled hands clamped around the handle of her shopping
cart.

“
I’m going to go,” Phil told
Lori. “I’ll see you at home.”

“
Just when it was getting
interesting. Pick me up a bag of Dove darks too, will
you?”

“
Will do.”

Phil hung up and pocketed the phone.
Up until now, curiosity had kept him rooted to the spot—and clearly
he was not alone in feeling that way—but now he felt uneasy, the
awkwardness and weirdness of the situation registering as a quiver
in the pit of his stomach. And while he was rarely the kind of man
to intervene or contribute to situations he deemed none of his
business, the words were up and out of his mouth before he could
think to stop them.

“
Maybe someone should call
an ambulance?” he suggested, his words aimed at the manager, who
was gathering himself with great difficulty, his face the color of
a beet.

And then the mother moved. In a motion
better suited to a machine, she reached out and snapped free of its
hook a bag of sour candy. Her other hand came up and she ripped the
plastic bag wide open. Candy flew on both sides of her. Like a
seagull hovering above a school of mackerel, the kid inspected the
colorful debris, and then dropped to the floor to retrieve
them.

The woman turned, her gaze like a
lighthouse beam as it swept over the onlookers before settling on
the nervous face of the manager.

“
Miss, I’m going to have to
ask you to l—”

With both hands, and hard
enough that her knuckles made a hollow
thwock
sound as they mashed her upper
lip against her teeth, the woman crammed two fistfuls of the
candies into her mouth.

As if helpless to do anything but
mimic her, the manager’s mouth dropped open. With the spell broken
by repulsion and maybe the same note of trepidation that had
insinuated its way into Phil’s stomach, a few of the shoppers at
last began to make their way out of the aisle. Phil started to
follow, but then the child, hands full of multicolored candy, rose
and once again stared at him.

Inexplicably
unnerved—
it’s a kid, for Christ’s
sake
—Phil composed a smile he was sure must
have looked as plastic and insincere as it felt. “Hey,
kid.”

Propelled by impotent outrage, the
manager hurried away, no doubt to fetch someone with a steelier
disposition.

Phil felt abandoned.

Overhead, one of the fluorescents
flickered and dimmed.

The mother stopped chewing and turned
her empty eyes on Phil.

He nodded. “Hi there.”

Both of them were staring at him now,
neither one of them moving.

Then the child extended his arms to
offer Phil the candy.

2. Collision

“Did you take some?”

Stopped at the light at the
intersection of Lincoln and Mulberry, the afternoon sun blazing
down on the windshield, Phil smirked at Lori’s words on the
speakerphone. “Well yeah, it seemed like the polite thing to do.
Tasted like shit though. I hate those things. Never saw the point
in taking a perfectly nice piece of candy and ruining
it.”

Now that he had put some distance
between himself and the store, or more accurately the woman and the
child he had encountered there, he felt better, and in truth, more
than a little ridiculous. Weren’t shopping giants, Walmart in
particular, famous for the types of people who patronized them?
He’d seen more than one meme floating around the web showing
pictures taken in the aisles of zany characters and fancifully
dressed oddballs. The store claimed to offer the best prices on
household goods and groceries, so why wouldn’t it attract all walks
of life?

Still though, the majority of those
images were shared with the intention of eliciting humor from the
viewer. He could find nothing funny about what he’d seen
today.

“
Did you get my Doves?” Lori
asked.

“
Yep. And everything else
you asked for. Oh, except for the caramels. They didn’t have them
at Giant Eagle.”

“
Rats.”

“
Sorry.” He looked up and
out at the red light, willing it to change.

“
Eh, I’m not. And my thighs
won’t regret the loss of them either.”

“
Don’t mention your thighs
while I’m stuck here at the light.”

Her laugh was a wonderful sound and
chased away the last lingering stain the incident at the store had
imprinted on his mind.

“
You wouldn’t be nearly so
turned on if they were twice the size.”

He grinned. “Hey now, I have no such
prejudices against women with big thighs or anything
else.”

“
Right. That’s what every
guy says until it happens.”

Finally the stop light turned green,
and he eased his foot off the gas, allowing the Chevy to drift out
into the intersection.

“
Yeah, but in my case I
happen to m—”

An explosion of light and sound and
Phil was slammed forward into the steering wheel, the hard rubber
fracturing his ribs and crushing the air from his lungs, and then
back into his seat, his neck cracking painfully as the vehicle
juddered to a halt.

“
Jesus
Christ
…” he moaned. Stars whirled in
his vision.

“
Phil?”

“
Okay…I’m okay,” he said,
not yet sure if this was the case, but retaining enough sense to
know that panicking Lori was something best avoided. “Fender
bender. I’ll call you back.”

“
Wait!”

Glass tinkling around him and the
smell of burning rubber clogging his nose, he jabbed with a
trembling forefinger the button to end the call and took a deep
breath, which he immediately regretted. It felt as if someone was
stabbing hot daggers into his sides. “Shit.” Hissing air through
his bloodied teeth, he fumbled for the door handle, noticing as he
did so the glass from both the door and windshield were gone and
that people were amassing around the car.

The door opened with a tortured shriek
and the space was filled with daylight splintered by backlit
figures.

“
You okay buddy?” someone
asked.

“
Move back folks, give him
some room,” said another.

“
I’ve called 911,” said a
third, and indeed Phil thought he could hear sirens in the
distance, though it could just as easily have been the ringing in
his ears. As he allowed his shadowy benefactors to gently extricate
him from the car, the cell rang behind him. Lori, freaking out, he
imagined. He realized he couldn’t leave it too long before he
called to let her know he was okay. Maybe by then he’d know if that
was the truth.

The good Samaritans helped him across
the street and sat him down on the curb where he regulated his
breathing as much as his injured ribs would allow. Horns honked
around him; people yelled.

After some indeterminate amount of
time, and with his whole body trembling, he blinked cold sweat from
his eyes and inspected the damage.

He’d been following a PT Cruiser into
the intersection when another vehicle had slammed into him from
behind, in turn forcing his car into the Cruiser. The PT didn’t
appear to be too damaged. Phil’s Chevy had absorbed the worst of
it. The backend had accordioned inward, his trunk gaping open, one
rear wheel bent inward.

The offending vehicle, a grey Toyota,
had suffered similar damage to its front end. Through the steam and
smoke from the ruptured engine block, he tried to make out if the
driver had escaped unscathed. He could see that the windshield was
cracked and starred but still in place. If there was anyone still
inside they were invisible to him.

The sirens were closer now.

“
Can I get you anything?” a
young woman in athletic gear asked. She was standing over him, her
face writ with concern.

“
No, thank you, I’m okay.
Just need to stay off my feet for a minute. But thanks. You’re very
kind.”

“
Anything you need,” she
told him. As he watched her vanish into the crowd he was reminded
of an old Ray Bradbury story he had read once about people who
showed up all-too-quickly at the scene of traffic accidents. In
that story, they’d been a sinister bunch, but he was glad of their
help today.

The door of the Toyota swung open, and
though Phil could not yet make out the driver, he took it as a good
sign that they were at least uninjured enough to exit the
vehicle.

Until he saw who it was and his heart
froze in his aching chest.

“
The fuck…?” he muttered,
his voice a mere croak.

It was the woman from the store. She
staggered free of the car and the haze of smoke, her lifeless gaze
and the nasty gash running like red lighting from her hairline to
the bridge of her broken nose making her look like something from a
zombie movie. Blood made a scarlet mask of her face. She paused,
her body weaving to and fro, and fell to her knees. Phil thought he
heard one of them crack like kindling.

“
Oh God,” someone said and
hurried over to attend to the injured woman, but when they reached
her, she had strength enough to shove them aside. It quickly became
apparent as more people tried to help and were rebuffed, that no
matter how severe the woman’s injuries, she was moving with a
singular purpose.

And that purpose was Phil.

She rose, her eyes fixed on him, and
resumed walking toward where he sat paralyzed by the surreal aspect
of what he was witnessing. A number of thoughts flickered through
his addled mind, each one more panicked than the last:

She hit me on
purpose.

She’s insane.

She’s going to try to kill
me.

Yet still he could not move, was
afraid to try. The bones in his chest felt like shards of broken
glass and he feared if he stood, he’d shatter into
pieces.

“
Jesus, I thought she was
dead,” said an onlooker to his right.

Still, despite it all, a worse thought
than the potential malevolence of the woman’s intentions occurred
to him, resolving itself from the fog much like the woman
had.

“
There’s a kid,” he
said.

The young man who had spoken looked at
him. “What was that, buddy?”

“
In the car. There’s a kid.
She had a kid with her.”

He looked from Phil to the encroaching
woman, who was still resisting the best efforts of the crowd to
assist her, to the car. “I’m pretty sure—”

“
Check,” Phil told
him.

The young man nodded and set off,
giving the woman a wide berth as if afraid she might attack him.
Phil didn’t blame the guy. Despite her injuries, she looked capable
of anything. There was a madness in her eyes of a kind Phil had
never seen before. It chilled him to the core and he knew he would
be seeing it again, all of this, for many sleepless nights to
come.

“
Ma’am, you should probably
sit down,” an older gentleman said, his wrinkled hands extended to
catch her if she should fall again. She ignored him and the man
moved away, perhaps assuming she was simply going to sit down
beside Phil to await the paramedics. One look at the lightless
holes where her eyes should have been should have told him
otherwise.

Phil’s body tensed in anticipation of
a blow. He waited to see a knife or a gun, or just her hands hooked
into claws meant to flay him or pluck out his eyes, all while she
screamed at him that he would never understand the humiliation she
had endured at the store.

Remembering his first and only
encounter with the woman prior to the accident summoned once more
fear for the wellbeing of the child and he looked past the woman to
the young man by the car, who looked back at him and gave a shrug
and a single shake of his head.

No kid here,
buddy.

Phil swallowed and looked up into the
terrible face of the wounded woman as she loomed over him. He was
too weak to defend himself, too dazed to understand all that had
happened in the past few minutes, and was happening still.
Somewhere along the line his life had jumped the tracks and he had
found himself in a nightmare, and like the worst kind of nightmare,
he could not move, the people around him too busy chatting,
redirecting traffic, or filming the scene with their iPhones to
realize the very real and possibly dangerous drama taking place on
the edge of it.

The woman looked down at him. This
close he could see that the side of her face was swelling,
darkening, and her lower lip had split almost down to the cleft in
her chin, exposing the dots of blood on her gums. Nausea rose in
his chest and he prayed he wouldn’t vomit, for surely the violence
of that response would further aggravate his own
injuries.