Simon hails from West Grove, Pennsylvania, and is currently attending Shippensburg University.  Click  HERE  to read his web journal.

     Door to door fundraiser. The image draws over the kitchen table, text collecting into clouds above it. His teeth are grains of low resolution until it bleeds into memory. They are specked with yellow, gaps in between them, candy he’d snuck from his box coming off his breath. A winter coat with cuffs leading up to the box, the image rushes forward to the kitchen table and a button shirt. A collared shirt prepared for school photographs. The shirt is hidden beneath the coat, and my youth is noted, stored, disregarded. He wants my mother, seven years old and he wants my mother, could my mother come to the door?
      The candy slides against the box. A crumpled photograph of a car, I see the dripping car and think of the box. The box is the only way I see him. The connection fits together. Other eyes stare at images drawing over kitchen tables and a little black boy’s face stares back. Onward the car drips, onward there is no mourning, they do not see the box.
     Clouds clear to text, depression, the word leaks below the boy, lines outside the image of the car, the dripping car. The crane lifts and it drips into the river from which it came.
     "Missus would like to buy candy." It’s a question, the fumes of candy breath drift up, the candy child asks if my mother would like to buy candy. The box opens, the inside drips as the past intertwines with the present, then solidifies once again. It is nothing but candy, would the missus like to buy some candy?
     The face changes, the sun sinks down and with its reemergence a coffee stain threatens at its side. The clouds of text surround a lake of hair, two eyes between them. The boy’s mother, blue uniforms behind her. She is regret in its pools of teary saltiness. It speaks of motives and failures and what should have taken two rather than one, her down there with him, but life fights where death cannot. Little fingers cannot pry the seatbelt so easily, the drowning body cannot save another. Where two bodies are supposed to be, there is only one, the other stares out from grainy images on kitchen tables, unable to defend itself from clouds of text.
     And the missus would like to buy some candy. Between them my eyes are weary of taste and chocolate and the common mixture of the two. Ignorance reaches up to an adult’s choosing, the buds dry out until they can be indifferent to sweets. It doesn’t matter, the missus must think, it is for the cause and not the candy.
     The cause is left in the air, swimming around our ears but refusing to tell its secret. For now he is just the candy child, bringer of sweets and collector of money. He has yet to drip, he has yet to be tied down, to soak in river water until it reaches up to steal inside his mouth.
     Beneath the showerhead I hold my breath and let the spray hit my open eyes. It’s lonely under the tap water, he is near and I can feel him trying to breathe. The lungs thicken, make themselves known inside my chest until the candy child dwells within them and screams, if only to let him out, but with inhalation he is pulled away from me into a river that shows no remorse. He cannot choose like I can, and in that way we are both different.
     Our door closes, his face is triumphant through the crack, he has sold again, the missus has been beguiled by white teeth specked with yellow, by candy breath and the way his dark skin reminds one of chocolate. A fog of arrogance surrounds the missus and for a moment she seems to forget the candy in her hands, there is something familiar about the look in her eyes when I see her staring at the kitchen table image, her memory sees the candy child too, a stem reaches up from the grain and sinks into lost eyes.
     You blink and you see them, mother and child, with sleep they are given detail, the shaved head of the child and the unkempt hair of the mother, the sleepy eyes of early morning and the nervousness that preludes death. With the clouds, I am told of depression, of goodbye letters and what is thought to be her last breath. A car holds the power of a determined driver, she's determined to fall away and take the candy child down with her, they will drown together and when the souls flee they will clasp hands and he will save her before she can be pulled off.
     I can see the seat belts clasp, the spinning wheels, a scared child calling his mother’s name and meeting the silence from the front seat. And then the car is moving away, streetlights flowing by until the barrier is broken and they are soaring, the sky watching them with blue eyes before the nose dips forward and they are both staring into the depths of a dark river. With speed it opens its mouth and takes them, white foam pressing against the windows and a retreating sun from behind and the mother is screaming, louder than the child could ever scream. For a moment the car bobs up, clearing the surface as if to tell them the river will take them down, but the floor has grown cold from pooling water. The mother watches it there. In the water she can see the misery of death, it freezes her while the coldness travels up her legs and dampens her clothes. When it finally touches her chest she is clawing, a little child’s head is already submersed but she can only think to get away before the water creeps inside her and takes her. She isn’t ready to die, survival tells her, there are so many things lost she wishes to find and in death she cannot find them. The child struggles as well, his eyes watching his mother through the water as his numb fingers search through the darkness. But he is disoriented and scared, and when his mother finally breaks free and crawls through the open window, he forgets the buckle entirely and reaches up to her, his mouth screaming into little bubbles collecting above him. He cannot breathe, but in moments things start to darken and this is nice, he does not wish to see, the child wants sleep, its softness resting inside of him until everything fades away.

     I close my eyes and the candy child opens his box. Tenderly, I reach inside.

© 2004 Simon Owens