Franklin is paralyzed at the sight of the bag. He knows what is inside of it. When Jujy pulls out a tiny hand, no bigger than a four-year-old’s, Franklin figures that she has just returned from a hunt. She’s killed a child and brought back the remains.
“Your teeth aren’t sharp enough to tear through the meat,” Jujy says. “I’ll do it for you.”
She rips a sliver of meat off of the tiny hand and stuffs it into Franklin’s mouth. Franklin doesn’t move. He is in shock. He pushes it out of his mouth with his tongue, but Jujy stuffs it back in with her long fingernail.
“You need your strength,” she says. “I’m going to save you.”
She pushes the meat so far back into his throat that he is forced to swallow it or choke. The meat is rough going down.
“That’s good,” she says.
He doesn’t move at all. She begins to chew up the meat for him and spit it into his mouth. But before she makes him swallow again he sees a face staring at him from inside of the bag, peeking out among the bloody pieces of flesh. It is the face of a dead four-year-old girl, staring at him blankly as he is force-fed skin from her knuckles.
For several hours, Franklin is in a daze from the strawberry drug, from the pain, and from the shock of seeing the dead girl’s face. He is only partially aware when Jujy connects a new leg to his stump.
The leg looks like that of a mannequin’s only it is red and made of hard candy. It smells like sour apple. In his daze, Franklin smiles at it.
“It matches my suit,” he says with a limp smile, a line of drool slipping from his lips.
Jujy pats him on the shoulder, happy that he approves.
He is surprised when he discovers that he can move the joints and toes of his new candy leg.
Franklin remains in a drunken state for a couple of days. Jujy cuts more body parts from him and replaces them with candy parts. She removes his left hand and gives him one made of marzipan. She skins his chest and pours hot melted green apple liquid onto him. When it cools, it hardens into candy skin like hers. She cuts slits into his good arm and inserts gumballs. Then she glazes it and coats it in cinnamon. She removes his eyebrows and all of his hair. She cuts off his cheeks and his nose, replacing them with green and white swirled lollipops. She leaves his brain exposed, but decorates it with sprinkles and candy buttons.
Jujy continues to force-feed him human flesh, but he is unsure whether it is the flesh of children or pieces of his own body. He decides he’d rather not know.
Franklin keeps asking her why she is doing all of this to him, but her reply is always: “I’m saving you.”
Jujy files Franklin’s teeth into sharp points as she goes to the bathroom in front of him. She does not have a bathroom. She uses a candy dish for a toilet. In the middle of sharpening his teeth, she just pulled the large dish out from the corner of the room to beneath her squatting legs and began to defecate in front of Franklin as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
Blood dribbles out of Franklin’s mouth. Even though most of his senses are dulled, his stripped teeth are still intensely sensitive to the grinding stone against the nerves in his teeth. Even the air brushing through his teeth as he inhales causes his eyes to water.
His senses are also not dulled to the intense aroma of the candy woman’s shit piling into the candy dish like a coil of soft serve ice cream. The excrement is a swirl of pink and purple colors. It emits a very sweet and tangy smell, like Nerds watermelon-grape candy. Yet it also has a terrible stench within the sweet. A rancid infected wound smell that is far more foul than that of human feces.
Franklin cringes at the aroma and tries to break away from her grip on his jaw, but his muscles are too weak. He tries to speak to complain to her, but only blood bubbles out of his mouth. When she is finished, she pulls out a roll of toilet paper-sized bubbletape and wipes her hard strawberry buttocks. But she only pushes the candy dish to the side, doesn’t even bother to put the lid back on the dish, so Franklin is forced to endure the smell through the duration of his teeth sharpening.
Eventually, Franklin builds a tolerance to Jujy’s strawberry drug. It doesn’t affect him as much as it did. He is able to think more clearly.
When Jujy tries to feed him the meat of a child, Franklin has the willpower to resist.
“I won’t eat that,” he says with his new green gummy lips.
“But I hunted it for you,” she says.
“I can’t eat children,” he says. “It’s terrible.”
“No, these are really good ones,” she says, looking in her bag for a good piece. “Just try a bite.”
Franklin grabs her with his marzipan hand. “No, I mean it is a terrible thing to eat children. I won’t eat them.”
“But what will you eat?” she asks.
“Anything else,” he says. “Candy.”
“It’s not healthy to eat just candy,” she says. “You need meat.”
“I’d rather die than eat the meat of a child,” he says.
Jujy looks at him with a confused frown, as if he’s offended her in some way. Franklin thinks that if anyone he should be the one who is offended. She digs through the pieces of flesh, looking for one that might be suitable for him, but Franklin just shakes his head at everything he is offered.
Jujy returns with a new bag of food for Franklin. This time it is filled with candy instead of flesh. There is a mound of chocolate that looks as if she cut it out of the side of a hill. There are peanut butter taffy flowers. There are spicy ginger plants, jawbreaker rocks, and a dead marshmallow animal.
The animal looks like some kind of rabbit or a squirrel. It’s not exactly either. Blood is leaking out of its white marshmallow fur.
“There is meat inside of it,” Jujy tells him. “You can survive on these.”
Franklin eats the chocolate and peanut butter taffy, but decides against the animal. The idea of bloody raw meat wrapped in marshmallow does not appeal to him. Jujy gives him an annoyed look when he doesn’t eat it, like there is something terribly wrong with him.
“Why are you keeping me prisoner here?” Franklin asks.
“You’re not my prisoner,” she says. “You are my guest.”
“Then unchain me,” Franklin says, tugging on his neck brace.
“It is for your own good,” she says.
“Just like removing my body parts and replacing them with candy is for my own good?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says.
Then she points at the marshmallow animal. “It is also for your own good if you eat that.”
Franklin cringes when he looks down on the creature. Its swollen bloody tongue dangles out of its white fluffy mouth.
“I can’t eat raw meat,” he says.
“Raw?” she asks. “What is raw?”
“Uncooked,” he says.
“Like the way cookies are cooked?” she asks. “Cooked meat would be weird.”
“That’s how humans eat meat.”
“We use cooking to make our buildings and furniture. We don’t cook food. That would be gross.”
“I thought you people read books about humans,” he says. “You should know humans cook their food.”
“I never read books,” she says. “Reading is boring.”
Then she smiles at Franklin and bites the marshmallow animal’s head off.
Licorice returns to meet Jujy’s guest as he had promised.
Most of Franklin’s skin is now coated in candy parts. He looks just like a candy man. He can’t believe he has become like one of the creatures he fears. His eyes are the only thing that appear to be human. Jujy gives him a pair of green candy sunglasses to cover them.