Sour Candy

by Kealan Patrick Burke

A line from a book he’d read in high school popped into his mind: The nameless are easier to bury.

“Old-fashioned. Kinda Amish, I guess.” Marsh looked up from her notebook. “You find the Amish strange?”

Being a bItch like WHY doesbit matter

“I’m asking you all of this, Mr. Pendleton, because when the officers went to your house, the child you just described seeing with Mrs. Bennings is the one who opened the door.”

Yo WTF!

“Our men?” Marsh asked. “One of those men was Officer Patricia Velasquez.” “Oh, for fuck sake, you know I didn’t mean it like that.”

Yo wtf is up woth this fuckkng cop man

Somewhere between encountering the woman in the store and his arrival home, he’d entered The Twilight Zone.

Yeah HUGE understatment buddy

The child wanted him aware of the game he was playing so that the effect would not be diluted by self-doubt or fear of madness. There was something terribly wrong with the child, and simply by crossing paths with him, Phil had caught his attention. He felt trapped in a bizarre otherworld in which everything was crooked, but the harder he fought to extricate himself, the more tangled he became. So, in the absence of better options, he stopped struggling.

Damn no choice but to give in to the damn kid

The child did not raise his head, but looked up at Phil through the sandy veil of his bangs,

Thats creepy

And too late he realized that what he had put into his mouth was not candy at all, but a key.

The sound costs him part of his mind. It’s the cost of being allowed to see as the symbols catch fire and blind him.

All he did find was that “gjøk” was the Norwegian word for “cuckoo”. He sat back with a bitter grin and poured himself another scotch. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the candy had been named after a brood parasite known for laying its eggs in the nests of other birds.

Any attempt to ingest other foods resulted in its immediate expulsion.

Damn that's fucked

Because that scream was a lot more than just an annoyance. No, the more Phil heard it, the more he started to think of it as something infinitely worse. He became convinced it was a beacon. The child was signaling the others.

The boy smiled. “Tomorrow’s the day you try to kill me.”

“You ate the candy,” the boy said. “You ate of her, and so her you will become.”

It didn’t sit well with him at all and he knew he’d be tonguing the fucking thing like a hole in his tooth until he found some kind of closure to it.