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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

In a situation in which every rational person is telling you a fact and you’re the one who denies it, doesn’t that make you the one most likely wrong?

People tend to distance themselves from the insane, as if to inquire is to request an invitation to the same dance.

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.