Franklin looks at the guy on the couch. He’s much younger than any of them with long greasy black hair, a scraggly beard, and several homemade tattoos. He looks like a cross between a hippie and a Mexican gang member.
“What does he do?” Franklin says. “Sell drugs?”
“He makes more than you,” Sarah says.
“Then why doesn’t he get you guys a nicer apartment? I moved here for a reason. I’m staying. If you want to move in with your boyfriend, find another love nest.”
“If you don’t leave now we’ll have David throw you out,” Susan says.
“If you don’t leave now I’ll call the cops on your drug dealer boyfriend,” Franklin says.
“What did you just say?” says a deep voice from the couch.
David stands up and faces Franklin. “Did you say you were going to call the cops on me?” He picks up Franklin’s red cane from the floor. It is the only item of Franklin’s that survived his wives’ meth-crazed wave of destruction. Franklin hopes that the guy doesn’t realize there is a sword inside.
Franklin pets the pistol in his pocket. “I’m not leaving.”
“Yes, you are,” David says.
Sarah cheers with glee as David swings the red cane like a baseball bat at Franklin’s head. But with his quick eye-hand coordination, Franklin is able to duck out of the way and land a punch in the center of David’s face. Although the punch hurt Franklin’s hand far more than it hurt David, it pisses the hell out of the young drug dealer.
“You son of a bitch!” Sarah screams at Franklin.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Susan says.
Franklin doesn’t understand why they are angry with him for defending himself.
David swings the cane another time and Franklin dodges it again. Franklin doesn’t try to throw another punch, because his hand is suffering enough from the last one. Then his two wives join the fight. They throw their fists at his red suit and kick at his shins.
Franklin puts one hand in his pocket to protect Crabcake and with his free hand he reaches for the gun in his other pocket. But before he can pull out the gun, Susan punches him in the side of the head, right on his temple. His right ear pops off. He doesn’t realize she has accidentally hit the button beneath his ear until he feels his skull opening up.
As Franklin takes his hand out of his pocket to retrieve his artificial ear, he sees David’s shadow behind him swinging the cane with all his strength. The cane slams into his exposed brain and Franklin blacks out.
Franklin awakes in an alley a couple blocks away from his apartment. His mind is foggy. He feels the side of his head and discovers that his skull is still open. He gently touches his brain with the tips of his fingers. There are cigarette butts and bits of dirt stuck to his neural tissue. There is also a fluid coating it that shouldn’t be there. He rubs some of the fluid with his fingers and smells it. It is human urine.
“What the…” Franklin yells. “Did they pee on my brain?”
He cringes as he tries to wipe the dirt and urine from the surface of his brain tissue, but every time he wipes it causes his mind to go fuzzy and warped. He cleans it the best he can and then pushes the button to close his skull. But his skull does not close.
Feeling the lids of his skull, he realizes that they’ve been jammed. Two pieces of the metal frame are bent. One of the pieces is dangling from its hinges. He’ll need to get another operation to fix it. In the meantime, his brain will have to remain exposed.
He still has his gun, which is jabbing into the side of his stomach. His cane is on the ground next to him. His entire body is filled with sore spots, so his wives must have beat him with the cane while he lay unconscious in the alley. He no longer has his hat or his right ear. His umbrella is missing. And his cat, Crabcake, is not in his pocket.
He scans the alley for his kitten, but she is nowhere to be seen. This worries Franklin. Crabcake stays with him twenty-four hours a day. She never leaves his side even for a minute. Even if he had been laying in that alley for days, she would not have voluntarily left his side.
“They took her,” Franklin says.
He gets to his feet. He knows the only way Crabcake wouldn’t be with him is if his wives kept the cat or did something to it.
Franklin leaves the alleyway, holding the gun in his pocket, ready to draw the sword out of the cane. He doesn’t care that his wives kicked him out of his apartment. He doesn’t care that they burned his stuff. He doesn’t care that they beat him and broke his skull lids. He doesn’t even care that they peed on his brain. But if they did anything to his cat, he will kill them all without hesitation.
He thinks that Jake, the guy who sold him the gun, might have been right. Maybe he was going to kill his wife with the gun. It wasn’t his original plan, but at this moment he is ready to kill someone.
As Franklin gets to the front of his apartment building, he hears a scream. A child’s scream. He stops and looks around. The street is empty. Another scream. This one is a loud cry for help. Franklin steps away from the entrance of his apartment and follows the screams.
In a parking garage around the corner, he sees a little boy being eaten alive by a man made out of candy. The man has bulging swirly lollipop eyes and long black licorice hair that resemble dreadlocks. He wears a brown chocolate suit with jellybeans for buttons. The creature has ripped open the kid’s chest and is gnawing on his ribcage. The boy cries for help as the man eats him alive. He would have seen Franklin over the creature’s shoulder if his eyes hadn’t been slurped out of his head.
Still dazed from the damage to his artificial brain, Franklin isn’t thinking straight enough to be afraid. He pulls the gun from his pocket and points it at the candy man. Remembering what the gun dealer said about their candy skin, Franklin stumbles towards the candy man, aims for the head, and shoots him three times. Even though he’s only twelve feet away, the bullets don’t hit the creature in the head. One of them goes over its head. One of them grazes its soft caramel shoulder. But the third hits it in the side, cracking open its brown rootbeer-flavored candy coating.
The creature shrieks and leaps away from the boy. It sees Franklin. Its lollipop eyeballs swirl at him. Before Franklin can fire again, the creature turns and runs away. It moves as fast as a cat, leaping over the railing of the parking garage and down the street.
Franklin decides it isst better to help the boy than chase after the creature. The kid is in pieces. He is crying, coughing up blood. His ribs are exposed. Franklin can see his heart beating rapidly through the ribs.
“Don’t worry,” Franklin says. He kneels down and holds the kid’s hand. “I’ll get you help.”
The boy stops crying and stares at Franklin with empty eye sockets.
“What time is it?” the boy asks.
Franklin isn’t sure why the boy wants to know the time, but he looks at his watch and tells him anyway. “It’s a little past midnight.”
The kid smiles.
“That means it’s my birthday now,” he says.
Franklin then recognizes the kid. It is Jimmy. The little kid who wanted to pet Crabcake the previous day. The nice kid.
“That’s why I went to the rootbeer man,” he says. “I thought he was going to give me a present for my birthday.”
The kid no longer seems to be in any pain. Franklin hopes he’s just in shock.
“Troy promised me that somebody would get me a present this year,” he says. “He wouldn’t tell me who. I was hoping it would be a wizard or a lion tamer or someone magical like that. That’s why I thought the rootbeer man might be the one. I didn’t know he was going to be mean.”
Franklin realizes that Jimmy isn’t just in shock. The boy isn’t feeling pain anymore because he is about to die.
“Jimmy,” Franklin says. “The person who bought you a present was your brother, Troy. He told me today that he was going to buy you a transformer. The one you wanted.”
