Jujy leans her white taffy face into Franklin’s. He looks into her pink eyes.
“You’re not made of candy, are you?” she says. “You’re one of those grownup children!”
Franklin steps away from her as her eyes grow wide. She steps towards him as he steps back, so that the distance between them remains the same.
“I’ve never tasted one of you before,” she says, licking her red gummy lips at him.
In his intoxicated state, Franklin doesn’t push her away as she wraps her arms around him and bites into the side of his neck. While his blood leaks down her sugar-white neck, he breathes in so much of her strawberry fragrance that his mind rolls into a soft, comfortable, dream.
When Franklin awakes, he finds himself hanging from a cookie ceiling, his wrists tied together with black licorice as strong as leather. His mind is still cloudy. His vision smeared. Focusing his eyes on something moving on the floor. It is white and fluffy. When his eyes clear, he recognizes it as some kind of animal. It is a puppy made of marshmallow. The puppy is attacking a large bright red jawbreaker like it’s a tennis ball.
Franklin examines the rest of the room. The walls all seem to be made of chocolate chip cookie dough that was baked into bricks. The carpet is furry brown sugar. The windows, made of thin hard candy, look like multi- colored stained glass. In the corner of the room, there is a bright yellow bed with pink flower patterns. Franklin isn’t sure what it is made of but it looks more rubbery than it does soft. His red cane is on the far end of the room, leaning against the wall. He wishes it was within arm’s reach.
Through the doorway in front of him, he sees the candy woman sitting at a table made of chocolate-covered wafers. She is holding a human leg in her hands and ripping chunks of meat off with her teeth. As she chews the raw flesh, she looks up and notices Franklin awake. She stares at him with her cold strawberry soda eyes, blood dribbling down her white chin.
With her mouth full, she says, “Your meat is not as tender as a child’s.”
Then she swallows and takes another bite.
Franklin looks down and discovers that his right leg is missing. There is a peppermint wood saw on the floor covered in blood. In his sleep, she had sawed off his leg and cauterized it with hot caramel sauce. Examining himself closer, he finds other chunks of meat hae been taken out of him. They are just small bites, like the one on his neck. All of his wounds are filled with hot caramel sauce. The strawberry fragrance fills the room, numbing his senses to the pain.
“What have you done…” Franklin says.
She swallows her food and wipes blood from her gummy lips.
“I’ve saved you,” she says.
Franklin looks at his cane nearby. If only he could reach it he would have a weapon.
“My leg…” Franklin cries.
She lifts his leg to him, as if she thought he was asking to see it. Half of the meat is gone. Franklin can see the exposed muscles and tendons. The limb doesn’t look familiar to him anymore. It looks like a piece of roadkill that the woman is eating raw. The only thing that Franklin recognizes is the apple-red pant leg covering the bottom of the limb like a burrito wrapper.
“It’s a little too chewy,” she says, picking at a piece of meat between her teeth. “And I don’t like all the hair.”
“Then why…” Franklin can’t complete a full sentence.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” she says, acting very defensive all of a sudden. “It tastes really good! I don’t think it’s gross or anything. I was just comparing the differences between your meat and children meat. Your meat is still good… just different.”
Her taffy cheeks blush into cinnamon redness. Then she awkwardly takes a large bite of his leg and acts as if it is the most delicious thing she has ever tasted, moaning and smiling at the flavor. Franklin opens his mouth to say something but no words come out. He just watches as she eats his flesh.
When she finishes eating, and there are only his bones left on the table, she rubs her swollen rainbow-swirled belly at him.
“That was delicious,” she says to him, but Franklin can tell that she really wishes she had stopped eating his leg halfway through.
As she disposes his bones in a waxy garbage can, there is a pounding on the door.
“Pixie sticks!” she cries and runs into the bedroom with Franklin.
She hushes him, cuts him down with one of her fingernails, and stuffs him in the bed, under the covers.
“If they find you they will cut you up and feed you to the lemon hogs,” she says.
She cuffs a lime brace around his neck, chaining him to the bedpost. After she tosses the covers over his head, kicks the saw under the bed, turns out the light, and shuts the bedroom door, she yells through her cookie walls at her visitor.
“Who comes here?”
“Jujube,” says a man’s voice. “Open now. We must speak.”
The man’s voice is deep and gurgling, like his throat is filled with bubbles.
Franklin, lying in the dark, hears the front door open.
“I do not want you here, Licorice,” she says to her visitor.
The man lets himself in.
Franklin crawls to the edge of the bed. The mattress smells like banana and has the texture of chewed gum. He peeks his eyes out from under the rubbery sheets and realizes the bedroom door has been left open a crack.
“Float is missing,” the candy man says. “We think he’s dead. The passage to the upper world is filled with blood. We think a human did it.”
“That’s impossible,” Jujy says.
The candy man paces the room and Franklin is able to get a good look at him through the cracked door. The man has black hard candy skin from top to bottom. He wears sweet tart jewelry and a tootsie roll hat. He seems to have no hair on his head, but he has a goatee made of cocoa butter.
“Not only that,” Licorice continues, “but we think his murderer is down here somewhere. We found a human weapon by the soda pond.”
“It is forbidden to bring human items into our world,” Jujy says.
“That’s why I believe a human brought it down here,” Licorice says. “We also trapped some wild gum-goblins that had meat in their bellies. If the meat is that of a human then we will be able to relax, but once it is examined I believe we will discover that the meat belongs to Float. It is likely that the human killed Float and his body was then eaten by the gum-goblins. The human might still be down here somewhere.”
“If there were a human down here he would have gone back to the surface by now,” Jujy says.
“Not necessarily,” Licorice says. “It is possible that
someone found him and took him home with them.”
“Who would do such a thing?” Jujy tries to laugh.
“I only know one person who would,” he says. “You.”
“Me?”
“If anyone would do such a thing it would be you,” Licorice says. “You were always the troublemaker when we were kids. You never liked to follow the rules. You always liked to visit the human world just because you thought it was fun.”
“I was a kid then,” Jujy says.
Franklin sees her nervously looking at him through the door, then looking back at Licorice.
“I would never hide a human in my home,” she says.
“Do you mind if I search it, then?” Licorice says.
“No, you can’t,” she says, stepping in front of the bedroom door.
Franklin crawls out of the covers and reaches for his cane. Because of his clouded mind, he isn’t able to be as careful or as quiet as he intended. When he touches the handle of the cane, it bounces off of his fingers, slides down the wall, and makes a loud clang as it hits a chocolate chip.
“What was that?” Licorice says.
