October 2007
From the Editor
Submissions
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Poetry by
Julian Jason Haladyn
Guadalupe Garcia McCall
C.S. Reid
Rob Taylor
Paul A. Toth
Fiction by
Elena Kaufman
Christopher Meades
Artwork by
Scott Malby
Steve Bunyard
Ian Rose, Editor
Tom Corcoran, Assistant Editor
Edie Ferlan, Assistant Editor
Readers:
Todd Heckler, Melanie Dempsey,
and Paul Rabinowitz
Candyman
by Elena Kaufman
He’s flat on his back, crushing a patch of wet grass. We circle him, watching his lips sputter out bubbles of saliva. His mouth curls to kiss the air. I stare at the wrinkles carved into his cheeks like the map of rivers we study in geography class. How can anyone be that old? We’ve been standing here all recess watching him shake. First his arm reaches to grab the grass and then his head rolls from side to side as if he’s saying ‘no’ to someone.
“Mr. Candyman?” I whisper and the kids look up to me.
It’s like we’re watching a car crash, where we can’t look away but don’t know what else to do. There’s little Susie who calls the old guy grandpa because she doesn’t know any better and Peter, who is slow in the head, standing there with his finger up his nose. My friend Benny leans against me taking deep breaths and even his eyes are glued to the old man, whose feet are jerking up and down on the grass. This is the first time any of us has seen the Candyman outside, and he looks much bigger in real life.
“Mr. Candyman?”
I want to go up and smell him, I mean really whiff his face, and touch his mop hair. I want to see his eyes up close, not through some dusty pane of glass into the shadowy basement room where he lives. But his eyelids are squeezed shut like he’d been real scared before falling down. Is he dying? I saw him two days ago and he didn’t look too good. To get to his place the kids sneak out of the schoolyard, crawl through the prickly bushes and run across Manitoba Street to the grey stucco house, number fourteen. At the back there’s an old kitchen window, and at the bottom of the wooden frame three little holes, for air to come in or to put birdseed out, who knows. That last time his fingers were shaking as he put a gold-wrapped fudge swirl into one of the holes.
“Push it further out Mister,” I called.
He looked at me through the window with his yellowy eyes. He never put a candy on our side of the ledge but made us stick our fingers into the air hole to get it. All the kids stood back except for Susie, who has the longest hair you’ve ever seen. She hid behind me and covered her eyes with her hair. Well, we never knew what the Candyman would do to us, did we? That’s why none of us would tell our moms about him. We only heard him speak once and that’s when he whispered through the window to Harry Winters, a quiet kid in grade five, who never went back again. When we grilled Harry, he just shook his head no, and no it was. Did he ever tell his parents? I mean is it right for a little kid with a harelip and shy eyes to go around his whole life with the Candyman’s secret filling his head?
The old man looks like a bum now lying on the wet grass with his dirty fingernails that need a good cutting, that’s for sure. Doesn’t he have a mother? There’s a bad smell coming from the dark spot on his pants. Around his private parts. And he’s shaking just like my dad when he drinks too much. My mom kicked my dad out of the house and yelled at him that as far as she was concerned he had a life detention. Then she warned me not to get myself into hot water like him.
It’s cold on the grassy hill outside our school, and I’m shivering because I forgot to take my parka even after mom told me to. I wonder if the Candyman is cold in his short-sleeved shirt. Maybe he’s just having a bad dream, his leg shaking like a crazy dog. Benny whispers that Mrs. Tate, our home class teacher is coming out to get us on the sidewalk across from our schoolyard, so I stick a candy into my mouth before recess is over and you have to spit your gum out in the garbage at the school entrance.
It’s caramel crunch, my favourite, which melts in my mouth until I get to the nut in the centre. I ate about six of those already and on good days I knew he’d give me two candies. Now that the old guy is being taken away I wonder what will happen to all his sweets. I know from experience that candies go bad if no one’s around to give them out. Once my dad hid my Halloween stash and I found it just before Christmas in the cupboard beside the stove with his empty beer cans, all gooey and stuck together.
The ambulance’s siren cries and the recess bell rings over and over again. Benny is taking bigger and bigger breaths, and I have an ache in my head as big as a football. Then there she is: Mrs. Tate. She stares at me with her huge owl eyes behind round glasses. She looks like she can see right through me to all the bad things I’ve done.
“Back to the yard everyone, you know better than to leave the school grounds.” She rounds us up. “Recess is over. Leave the man to the doctors, there’s nothing we can do.”
“But Mrs. Tate…” I say and she gives me the look so I shut up. It takes a good while for her to get a crowd of staring kids away from a man lying on a grassy hill face up to the sky with his eyes squeezed shut and his pant leg wet from pee.
In class she calls on me. “Timothy, I want you to read the next page of A Wrinkle in Time and speak up.”
Her eyes are like Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber lasering into me. I look down at my pencil and finish scratching off the gold letters Berol HB. I can’t answer her because there’s a football stuck in my throat.
After school I go straight home to my room and take out all the candy wrappers I saved, smooth them out, and look at the rainbow of colors together. Golden caramel, red cherry, green mint, brown chocolate and yellow lemon. I imagine eating them all at once and wonder what flavour I’d be able to taste, so I smell all the wrappers at the same time. Then I put them back between the pages of my X-Men comic and hide it at the bottom of the bookshelf.
It’s been seven days since the ambulance took him away, I know cause I made marks in my calendar and went to his kitchen window every day. Mostly when I peer in all I see are shadows. But today there’s something moving in there. Yes, it’s definitely moving. It’s black and white and pawing its way around the corner, playing with the dust. I tap on the window and he looks up at me, does a sideways jump and bounces out of my sight.
“Here kitty kitty, psst. Hey little guy.” Nothing moves for about five whole minutes then I hear the school bell ringing.
The next day, I bring the get-well card I made in art class. Creeping around the side of the grey house, I step over weeds and kick at some wet newspapers. There’s a basement door with a window and a mail slot in it. I knock and wait with one foot on the path ready to run. No answer. I try the glass window: tap tap, and hear the cat cry. I open the mailbox and peer in. The kitty is sitting there looking at me so I drop my card through the slot and watch him run up to it and paw it around the floor. Then I get on my bike and go home.
“Eat your dinner instead of playing with it,” my mom says.
I want to tell her what’s happened but her eyes have that blurry look. I always know when I get back from school if she’s in her bedroom watching her soaps or at the table drinking coffee until she gets really hyper and cleans the house from top to bottom and I have to stay in my room till she’s finished. The next morning at recess I sneak across the street to the side of the stuccoed house, running my hand along the rough wall and pulling off bits of grey rocks. I don’t tell anyone I still visit the Candyman because they’d think I’m dumb. The other kids have already given up on him. I put my nose against his dark window and through the holes smell dust and cat pee. There’s nothing to do but sit down on the brown grass in the back yard and wait. The black and white cat comes into the kitchen and jumps onto the other side of the windowsill.
“Hi furball!”
I stroke his neck through the candy holes in the windowsill and accidentally push him off the ledge. He hops back up and purrs at me. I take out the milk carton from my lunch bag and pour a few drops onto my finger and stick it through the hole. His sandpaper tongue licks my finger clean and I pour more milk through the hole in the window so it splashes onto the ledge and down the wall. I can tell the cat likes me very much. The next day in class when I have a lot to think about, Mrs. Tate bugs me.
“Timothy, tell the class what Christopher Columbus was searching for on his famous expedition.” Every day she asks more and more questions, like I’m a criminal under a spotlight. “Timothy, did you read the discovery chapter?” My Berol pencil is so small that I can barely hold onto it.
That afternoon I think about finally telling mom about the old man and maybe she can call the cemeteries to see if he died or something. Before going home I walk over to the house and for the first time ever go right up the front steps and ring the doorbell. A man with a shiny head opens the door and stares at me and I think maybe he’s the Candyman’s roommate.
“What are you selling?” he asks, “'cause I don’t want any.”
My hands are sticky in my pockets and I hold onto my pet rock, turning it over and over.
“Um, I was just wondering if, if, you know the.”
The phone rings and he turns away leaving the door open so I step into his living room and see a TV bigger than I’ve ever seen in my life. I hear his voice all mean on the phone and turn around and run back to my house and to my room with the door closed and no appetite for dinner. By Sunday it’s been almost two weeks since we’ve seen the old man on the grassy hill and I am ready to give up my detective work. I just have one question for the bald guy so I ride my bike to the house for the last time. I have so much homework to do now, like write a book report and do five pages of math. As I round the corner I almost run over a pigeon, who loses a couple of feathers. Turning onto Manitoba Street I can’t believe what I see. There, right in the front yard, is Mr. Candyman himself.
He’s in a blue and red lawn chair with a baby’s bib on and a nurse is feeding him something from a bowl. I’m about to get out of there when she calls out. “Hello young man, do you live around here?”
I nod. “Well, that’s good news. Do you know Mr. Treat then?” My head is getting real hot. “Um, I, I’m not sure. Ma’am.”
Very slowly, the Candyman moves his head up and down. He smiles at me and reaches his hand out and I don’t know what to do so I get on my bike and ride away as fast as I can, knocking over a garbage can in my way. When I get to Benny’s house I bang on his bedroom window and wave at him to follow me. The nurse laughs when she sees us ride up.
“Well hello again. Mr. Treat, now you have two visitors. Look.”
She laughs in this soft way and because Benny’s with me and she’s a nurse, I feel okay. Just then the mean man from upstairs comes out of his door and on to the porch and stands there, looking at us.
“Jonathan, could you get your father some water?” the nurse says, and the mean man gets a cup of water for the old guy. Then the nurse looks at us. “Would you two boys help me with something? Mr. Treat has diabetes and isn’t allowed to eat sweets.”
Jonathan, the used-to-be-mean-man, shakes his head and pats the Candyman on his white mop head and goes back into the house. Ben and I look at each other. “We found two boxes of candy in his apartment and there’s absolutely no way he’s going to be eating them. Are you Mr. Treat?” Mr. Treat looks at us. His eyes water and his hands shake like two leaves. He starts coughing pretty hard and the nurse lady pats him on the back and gives him some water. I take a candy from his warm leathery hand.
Elena Kaufman is a Canadian writer currently living in Hamburg, Germany. Her work has previously been published in Pharos and New Shoots Anthology. She has also written two dramatic monologues, for New Monologues for Women by Women II (Heinemann) and Audition Arsenal (Smith and Kraus), as well as a news article for The Hamburg Express.