The Cannibals of Candyland

by Carlton Mellick III

  Franklin hates children, loves animals, and is deathly afraid of the candy people.

  He also hates: riding the bus, talking to people on the phone, talking to people in person, dancing, getting haircuts, modern politics, the sound of vacuum cleaners, popular men’s fashion, getting stared at, getting presents, having a boss, Chinese food, and his two wives.

  He also loves: walking around downtown, playing with the puppies at pet stores, reading history books, listening to Mozart and death metal, watching the sound of autumn leaves rustling in the wind, making sandwiches, talking about books, blowing up balloons, historical politics, growing older, giving presents, working for himself, chess, Korean food, and wearing red.

  He is also afraid of: pretty much everything.

  Red is his favorite color. All of his clothes are red. He likes a particular shade of red that he calls apple-red. It is a bright red with a hint of orange.

  His wives always say: “Your clothes are too orange-ish to be called apple-red.”

  He always responds: “When I was a boy, my parents had a tree in the front yard that grew apples of this color.”

  His wives always shake their heads at him.

  Franklin walks down the sidewalk in his apple-red suit, wearing red gloves, a red baseball cap, and holding a red umbrella over his head. He shines loudly at every person who passes him. The people in his neighborhood have grown used to his glowing attire, but whenever he enters a new part of the city he can feel everyone’s eyes on him. This is a bad part of Chinatown and not the kind of place where you’d want to stand out. A small gang of what Franklin believes to be Triads eye him from across the street near the entrance of an Asian strip club. If it wasn’t raining they probably would confront him. Franklin has been beaten up twice just for wearing his red suit. Once by skinheads because they thought he was gay. Once by a couple of Chinese drug dealers because his clothes pissed them off, and because he walked on their sidewalk without the intention of buying any of their drugs.

  He closes his umbrella and enters a pawn shop. Jake, the fat crooked-lipped owner of the shop, squints his puffy eyes at him as he approaches the counter. They nod at each other.

  “In the back,” Jake says.

  Franklin wipes water out of his soul patch as he steps behind the counter into the back room. It is filled with cardboard boxes, broken appliances, a glass case full of swords,

  and an over-used sex doll with Judy Jetson hair.

  “Adam wasn’t fucking around when he said I’d recognize you,” Jake says, flapping his arms to air out his yellow-stained armpits. “That suit is one of a fucking kind.”

  It wasn’t exactly a compliment, but Franklin smiles as if it were. “I have all my clothes tailored in Argentina.”

  “Whatever floats your boat.” Jake pulls a beer out of a mini-fridge and sits down in a rubber chair. He doesn’t offer Franklin a seat. “Some people blow all their money on strippers. Some people blow it all on faggy outfits.”

  Franklin clears his throat. His hands hide in his pockets.

  “Okay, let’s see what I’ve got for you,” Jake says. He opens up the casing of a broken VCR and pulls out a pistol wrapped in a white cloth. He unwraps it and presents the weapon to Franklin.

  Franklin’s left hand curls around the cold metal barrel and he picks it up like a hatchet. Then he places it into his right hand.

  “How does it feel?” Jake says.

  Franklin nods at the gun and rubs his fingers against it.

  “That there is a Walther PPK,” Jake says.

  Franklin says, “Wasn’t Adolf Hitler’s gun a Walther PPK?”

  “Where’d you read that?” Jake says.

  “I’m kind of a history buff.” Franklin smiles and hands the gun back.

  “So you don’t want it?”

  “No, thank you,” Franklin says. “I’m not interested in a Nazi gun.”

  “This is a common weapon,” Jake says. “It wasn’t just used by Nazis. James Bond also used a Walther PPK. Don’t you like James Bond?”

  “My grandmother was a holocaust survivor.”

  “So was my wife’s family. What’s the big deal?”

  Franklin shakes his head.

  “Didn’t Adolf Hitler kill himself with his Walther PPK? Just think of it as the gun that killed Hitler.”

  “Don’t you have anything that’s not so antique. Something newer?”

  “I only sell classics,” Jake says. “Adam said you were a collector. I don’t sell them for any other reason. No fucking way.”

  “I’m a collector.”

  “I’m just doing the community a service,” Jake says. “Ever since the pussyfart liberal government took away our second amendment, us collectors had to move underground. I’m not in the business of selling arms to street thugs or to vengeful husbands who want to kill their cheating wives.”

  “You sell bullets, though, right?” Franklin says.

  “Of course I do,” Jake says.

  “Okay, how much?” Franklin says.

  “Look, I don’t think I even want to sell it to you now. You look like a fucking wife-killer.”

  “How do I look like a wife-killer?”

  “You look like the kind of guy who gets cheated on all the time.”

  “I’m not going to kill my wife,” Franklin says. “It’s for protection. Maybe I’m not a collector, but I need this.”

  Jake gives him a deep stare.

  “Look me in the eyes,” he says.

  Franklin looks him in the eyes.

  “I can tell if a fuck is being dishonest if I look him in the eyes.” Jake blows snot into his fingers as he moves in closer. “Now tell me, what do you need the gun for?”

  “Protection.”

  “Bullshit,” Jake says. “Who do you want to kill with this? Your wife?”

  “Not my wife.”

  Jake leans back and rubs the back of his neck, exposing crusty gray armpit hair. “Okay. Let’s say I believe you. If not your wife, then who? The guy who’s fucking her? Your boss? Some guy who owes you money?”

  “No,” Franklin says. “I would never kill a human being.”

  “But you’re interested in killing,” Jake says. “I see it in your eyes.”

  “I would never kill another human being.”

  “You’re not...” Jake says. “You’re not one of those candy man hunters are you?”

  Franklin breaks eye contact with the fat man. Just for a split second, but the fat man notices.

  “You are, aren’t you?”

  Franklin pets something furry in his pocket. “Yeah, so?”

  “You believe in the candy people, too?”

  “Yeah… do you?”

  “I’ve seen some weird shit,” Jake says. “But I’ve never seen any fucking candy people. There’s a big part of me that thinks it’s all a bunch of bullshit, but there’s a little part of me that isn’t quite sure.” He cracks open another beer. “A lot of people come to me wanting to buy guns to protect their kids from the candy people. They tell me they’ve actually seen those things up close. I’ve looked them right in the eyes and not a single one of them has ever lied to me. Whether they exist or not, I have no fucking clue. But I’ve met a lot of people who truly believe they are real.”

  “They are definitely real,” Franklin says, leaning in closer to Jake’s eyes. “I promise you. They are real. And I am going to kill every last one of those bastards.”

  Jake stares at him for a few minutes and snorts. Then he pulls three boxes of bullets out of the VCR.

  “In that case,” Jake says. “Let me give you a little piece of advice. Shoot them at close range. You won’t be able to break through their hard candy-coating unless
you shoot them at close range or get a more powerful weapon.”

  Franklin nods and hands him an envelope. As Jake counts the money, Franklin examines the swords in the glass case and something catches his fancy. It is bright red, almost an apple-red.

  He turns to the fat man and asks, “How much for the red cane sword?”

  Franklin was named after Franklin Pierce, the 14th President of the United States. Franklin Pierce is known as one of the worst presidents in the history of the country, for doing nothing to stop the rising tension between the North and the South in the days before the Civil War. He just wasn’t a strong leader. He was the wrong person to be in charge of the country at that time in history.

  When he was young, Franklin always wondered why his parents named him after the worst president in history, but they wouldn’t tell him why. He studied the president, looked for a good side of him, looking for a reason as to why they would have named him after this particular man. Franklin Pierce was handsome, young, well-spoken, well-liked, and won the presidency in a landslide. He also accomplished quite a bit in the realm of foreign policy. Unfortunately, he just wasn’t up to the task of being president.

  After reading more about the president, Franklin started feeling sorry for the guy. Not only is he known as the worst president in history, he also lived a very tragic life. Two of his children died of diseases when they were very young. Then, two months before Pierce went into office, his third and final child was killed in a train accident. Jane Pierce, the president’s wife, blamed her son’s death on her husband’s political ambitions. During her stay in the White House, she went into a state of mental anguish. She spent most of her time locked in a room, all by herself, writing letters to her dead son. While in office, his wife turned on him, his political party turned on him, and even his Vice-President died forty-five days into office and was never replaced. Eventually, Franklin Pierce turned to alcoholism. It is believed that he killed an old woman while driving a carriage drunk one night. It is also believed that he drank himself to death after his wife died of tuberculosis.

  Franklin still wonders why his parents named him after this man. He wonders if they did so because Pierce was such a pathetic, tragic figure in history. He wonders if his parents viewed his birth as a tragic event in their lives. Perhaps they didn’t want him, and he ruined all of their hopes and dreams. Or perhaps they just wanted to name him after a president and chose the most handsome one they could find, without bothering to do any research on the man.

  With his umbrella tucked under his arm, his red cane (which contains a hidden sword) tapping with his footsteps, petting the inside of one of his pockets, he walks through the wet streets of Old Town to get back home. On the way, he runs into four children playing a game of can hockey in the street. Can hockey is somewhat similar to regular hockey, but instead of a puck they use a crushed beer can, instead of a stick they use their legs, and instead of a goalie box they draw lines in the road with chalk rock. They don’t use skates or helmets. It is a game Franklin used to play with his siblings when he was a kid, before they were brutally murdered.

  These kids are Franklin’s neighbors. He sees them playing in the street all the time, at all hours of the day, even at three in the morning. He tries to ignore them as he passes, but they stop playing their game when they see him in his bright red suit and chase after him. Their legs seem to be too short for their bodies, even for children. Franklin has noticed this in the past. It seems that most children around their age tend to have this genetic flaw. Although the news channels have never mentioned it, Franklin believes it has something to with the fetus-enhancing drugs that doctors are persuading pregnant mothers to take these days.

  “Let me see it,” one of the short-legged boys shouts at Franklin. The one with the thick-rimmed glasses.

  “Not today,” Franklin says.

  “Aww, come on,” the little one says.

  The little one is the nice one. His name is Jimmy. The brat with the thick-rimmed glasses is named Troy. He doesn’t know what the other two are called.

  “Just show it to us, bitch,” Troy says.

  Franklin keeps walking.

  “Just for a second you pussy bitch,” Troy says. “You want me to call the cops and tell them you tried to touch my dick?”

  Troy always threatens to call the cops on Franklin with child molestation charges if he doesn’t do what he wants. Because of this, Franklin often ends up buying the kid expensive toys or renting him R-rated horror movies. He doesn’t know what else to do.

  Jimmy tugs on Franklin’s red coat.

  “I just want to pet him once,” he says. “Just for a second.”

  Franklin lets out a puff of air.

  “Fine,” Franklin says. “Just one second.”

  He opens up his coat and a small kitten pokes its head out of the inside pocket. Its fur is red, white, and green. Candy-colored.

  Jimmy’s eyes light up. As he pokes his finger towards the kitten’s fur, the kitten deflects it with a lick of its scratchy tongue. This cat isn’t actually a kitten. It is a midget cat. It is a fully-grown five-year-old cat that is stuck in the body of a chubby little kitten with plump cheeks, frizzy fur, and scratchy high-pitched meows.

  “Her name is Crabcake.”

  Jimmy pets Crabcake on the head and she closes her eyes and smiles at him. A kitty smile.

  “She’s a cutie!” Jimmy says.

  Troy pulls a BB Gun out of his orange Naruto backpack and pumps the handle.

  “Hold it there, Jimmy,” Troy says as he pumps the pistol. “I’m going to shoot it out of his hands.”

  Franklin hides Crabcake inside of his coat.

  “Fucking psycho,” Franklin says to the kid and jogs away from them.

  The kid gets angry. “Wait! I didn’t say you could leave!”

  Franklin picks up his pace, holding Crabcake firmly inside his pocket.

  “Fucking faggot!” Troy yells. “Run away, you faggot!”

  Troy shoots his BB gun at Franklin’s back. Even though the BB just bounces off of Franklin’s suit, it still hurts him enough that he lets out a small yelp. Besides Jimmy, all of the kids laugh at him. They chase after him and take turns firing the gun at his back until he gets inside of his apartment building.

  Troy is the reason why Franklin hates children.

  Franklin lives in a tiny studio apartment in Old Town with two women that hate him: his wife and his wife’s mother. He calls them his wives because it feels like he has two wives whenever they’re both around. His wife, Sarah, looks very old for her age. Her mother, Susan, looks very young for her age. They look almost like twins. He isn’t sleeping with either of them. He tries to distance himself from them. The only thing they want from him is his money, which is never enough to satisfy them.

  When he enters the flat, he finds Sarah and Susan having sex with another man. They regularly sleep with other men, but they’re usually a bit more discrete than doing it froggy-style on the rug in the entryway. They also regularly share the same lover, but they usually don’t fuck him at the same time.

  Franklin assumes they were hoping that he would walk in on them, so he tries to act as if it doesn’t faze him. He steps over their wriggling legs and crosses the room to his box. Besides the bathroom, his box is the only private area in the studio. It is a homemade cubicle he constructed for himself using sheets of plywood for the walls. He also uses a blanket for a ceiling and door, so that his wives can’t see what he’s up to. To block out the sound, he listens to death metal on his headphones (which he initially only listened to because it was the loudest music he could think of, but he has strangely grown to enjoy it). It is the closest thing he has to a private room. His wives don’t ever bother him while he’s in his box, as long as he promises to never bother them anywhere else in the apartment.

  Franklin unfolds an aluminum chair and sits down at his small elementary school desk. He turns on a reading lamp attached to the side wall and pulls out his bottom-line
laptop from the cubbyhole. After it powers up, he plugs his headphones in and listens to some Human Remains MP3s to block out the sound of sex in the room. He turns the volume up as loud as it goes, but he can still hear Sarah screaming at the tops of her lungs as if she is purposefully trying to be heard over the music.

  His wireless card doesn’t pick up any unsecured networks at the moment, so he’s unable to log onto the internet. This annoys him because there have been a lot of candy people sightings in the past few days and he’s been wanting to track them or see if there have been discussions about them on the message boards.

  He lets out a puff of air and looks at the mess of notes and maps that are pinned to the wooden walls of the cubicle. His entire life has been dedicated to tracking down the candy people. Ever since he dropped out of college, it has been his primary obsession. He has other obsessions, such as reading historical biographies and inventing new types of sandwiches, but proving the existence of the candy people is the only thing that’s really important to him.

  Crabcake wakes up and climbs out of his coat. She yawns a crackling meow as she crawls into his lap and goes back to sleep. Franklin rubs her belly with his free hand.

  Franklin has given up a lot in his pursuit of the candy people. He dropped out of school to hunt the candy people. He’s lost several jobs because he was too focused on the candy people. He’s given up most of his free time to hunt the candy people.

  He also married Sarah instead of his first love, Staci, just because Sarah also believed in the candy people. He didn’t like Sarah all that much but he thought he would be happier with somebody who could relate to his obsession. He didn’t know that she was a compulsive liar before they were married, and that all of the encounters with the candy people she told him about were complete fabrications. If it wasn’t for his obsession he wouldn’t have married Sarah, which was one of the biggest mistakes of his life.

  He also moved to this neighborhood, even though it’s very small and the rent is very high, just because this area has the highest concentration of candy man sightings in the country.