As he hits the ground, a blob jumps onto Franklin’s chest. It is a fat purple blob that drools grape-flavored saliva as it opens its wide smiling mouth around Franklin’s head. There is a cracking sound and the grape blob is thrown off of Franklin’s chest and flies twenty-one feet into the air.
Lifting himself up, Franklin sees that someone has come to his rescue. A woman with a long red licorice whip flips through the air and lands on a chocolate malt ball nearby. She whips at the gummy blobs, sending them flying in all directions. The blobs scatter. The sound of the cracking whip seems to frighten them. They aren’t sensitive to pain, they are sensitive to noise. His rescuer just has to crack the whip a few more times and the rest of the gummy blobs flee into the lollipop forest.
Franklin looks at the woman. It is a candy woman. She walks towards him with red and white striped legs, her red vine whip thrown over her shoulder, and a big smile on her face. When she rubs her fingers through her cotton candy hair, Franklin recognizes her. She is the woman from his childhood. The one that murdered his brother and sisters. The one that ruined his life.
He goes for his cane sword on the ground, but when he comes up she is already standing in front of him, smiling at him.
“Are you cinnamon?” the candy woman says to Franklin. Her voice sounds like that of a cartoon elf. “I love cinnamon.”
She smells him and rubs her hand along his red suit. “Or are you candy apple?”
Franklin backs away from her. She smiles at his shyness and he becomes paralyzed at the sight of her razor-sharp teeth. She steps closer to him. The smell of artificial strawberry fills his nostrils. It intoxicates him even more than it did when he was a child. His eyes drift into a state of bliss. She smells him again and her face becomes confused.
“I don’t smell candy apple or cinnamon or anything,” she says. “What’s your name?”
He wants to cut her in half with his cane sword while she is off guard, but finds himself responding to her question.
“Franklin,” he says, stepping closer towards her.
“What kind of candy is that?” she asks.
“It’s not a candy, it’s my name,” he says.
“You mean you weren’t named after a type of candy?” she says. “I thought everyone was named after candy.”
“No,” Franklin says.
“Huh…” she says, leaning her hand on her glossy hip. “Well, my name is Jujube, but you can call me Jujy.”
The candy woman steps around Franklin and examines him.
“Hey, your brain is showing,” she says to him when she walks behind him.
“I know,” Franklin says.
She pokes at his brain a little, but stops once Franklin shakes her fingers away.
“Sorry,” she says.
As Franklin sways in the drunken delight, Jujy licks him on the shoulder.
“Your candy-coating doesn’t have any flavor at all!” she cries.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Wait a minute…” she says.
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.