Cristina Guarino

Candy Corn

"That's disgusting."

Sarah cringed and fake-gagged, drawing her throat up and extending her tongue in an exaggerated expression of distaste. The face contrasted with her frilly Little Bo Peep costume and stayed fixed as she tore furiously into the packaging of a Kit Kat, making Cassandra snort and choke on her Candy Corn.

"Are you serious?" Her voice came out in a harsh rasp and she cleared it, loosening the choker around her neck before continuing. "They're delicious. Easily the best candy you can get."

"First off," Sarah said, "The guy who gave them to you stuck his grimy hands into a paper bag and just dropped them into your basket." She gestured toward the plastic pumpkin Cassandra used for trick-or-treating only an hour earlier. Now the two of them were seated in Sarah's living room, lights off, blatantly ignoring the poor-quality slasher movie on TV. "Secondly, they're way too sweet. It hurts my teeth just biting into them."

"You're nuts. They're perfect. Plus, there's a right way to eat them, you know. You don't just chew on them like a steak. You mash them up nice and smooth and spread them over your tongue. That distributes them perfectly; they melt in your mouth that way and get nice and syrupy. Mmmm." Cassandra popped another into her mouth. She chewed for a moment before exposing her orange-and-yellow tongue to her friend.

"Yeah," Sarah said after a long pause, "I'm nuts."

The doorbell rang and Sarah jumped up, knocking her plastic staff over in the process. Cassandra shielded her eyes dramatically as her friend struggled to pull the short ruffles of her outfit down over her backside and ran toward the door.

"That's Jason!" she called from downstairs. A moment later their flamboyant friend's typically loud greeting was heard. Cassandra stood and observed herself in the hallway's full-length mirror while her friends made their way up the stairs: she was a gothic queen, her hair pulled up into a pouf that resembled a crown and falling in long tendrils around her shoulders. Her outfit was short like Sarah's, but black instead of peach, composed mostly of lace and silky ribbons.

Jason's costume was the total opposite. He wore a rainbow top hat with a blue and white striped shirt, complete with colorful suspenders and tight skinny jeans. His face was painted white to resemble a hockey mask and he even wore black contacts that consumed the whites of his eyes. In his right hand, he held a hockey stick.

"Really?" Cassandra asked.

"Jason needed a makeover," he said, lifting his chin up in defense. "How was trick-or-treating?"

"Fine. We had a few disagreements," Sarah said, narrowing her eyes at Cassandra, "but in the end, our different tastes benefitted both of us." She reached into Cassandra's bucket and snagged another Kit Kat. "How was the party?"

"Fun, Gary wound up passed out under the table again."

As if in response, the dining room table creaked, causing the three friends to hush and shift their attention to it. Sarah muted the TV, her eyes fixed on the table. The glow of the silent television in the night gave the room a supernatural glow that Cassandra hadn't noticed with the volume turned up.

A few moments later, they met each others' glances and laughed nervously.

"That reminds me of a scary story!" Jason chirped. The two girls groaned and relaxed in their chairs.

"With an outfit like that, don't expect to scare us very much. The only things that have a chance at creeping me out are those contacts."

"Like you're one to talk, Miss Ho Peep." He was smiling, but the shadow created by his hat and the fickle lighting of the TV screen morphed his grin into a spine-tingling grimace. His eyes didn't help. Cassandra shuddered and sunk lower into her arm chair.

"Yeah, yeah. Let's hear it, already." Sarah was fine, busying herself with her costume again. She clearly didn't feel the chill that was starting to tickle its way down Cassandra's neck.

Jason's story was typical enough, but something about it still made her uneasy. It focused on a dentist, years ago—of course, nobody knew how long exactly—who took pleasure in hurting her patients.

"She was a total loner. She grew up with terrible teeth, which is why she became a dentist, but she was so ugly that kids picked on her a lot when she was young. Especially in high school. So she would take her revenge on those generations by hurting the kids in her chair, particularly the teens."

"Oh, I've heard this one," Sarah said. "It started off pitiful enough, right? A yank here, a prod there. But then she started getting really sadistic. Cutting up the kids' gums and stuff like that."

Cassandra ran her tongue over her teeth. "Lovely."

According to the legend, she continued her sadistic practices until her patients caught on. None of the parents believed their stories, so the kids took one of two paths: switched doctors or decided to take revenge.

The woman, whose name was unknown, lived completely alone. She was home when a group of teens rang her doorbell on Halloween, pretending to trick or treat. They ambushed her when she opened the door, tied her down to a chair, and tortured her in a number of gruesome ways Cassandra tried to avoid imagining.

When the night was over, she committed suicide.

As expected, the story ended with a tie to the present. She roams the streets every Halloween, looking for solitary teenagers to torture one by one. The tradition of trick-or-treating in large groups supposedly stemmed from the story; she stays away from packs of kids in fear of what befell her that Halloween.

The room was silent when Jason finished. The three friends were each staring down at the stained wood floor, their hands in their laps.

"Well, all that did was depress me," Sarah said. She stood and grabbed her pumpkin basket, dumping its sugary contents into a crystal bowl on the dining room table. She picked the pieces of candy corn out for Cassandra and tossed them into her bucket in exchange for a few Kit Kats she pilfered out.

"Yeah, thanks, Jason."

"Hey, you might think it's stupid or depressing now, but wait until you get home. You'll be looking over your shoulder every five seconds."

It was two AM when Cassandra got home. Halloween fell on a Sunday that year and she knew she'd hate herself in the morning, but between the sugar and the ghost stories, she couldn't sleep. Instead, she grabbed another fistful of candy corn and sat at her computer desk. Leaning back, she propped her feet up next to the keyboard and turned on the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack, thankful that her parents were away for the weekend. She began savoring each piece, observing them thoroughly before setting them between her teeth and chomping off each layer.

She'd always wondered how the treat got its name. It was only vaguely shaped like a kernel andonly one-third yellow. The only yellow part of it was a small section at the top, followed by orange and white, two completely unrelated colors. Maybe the white tip could resemble the inside of the kernel, but where did the orange come in?

Oh well. Whatever their reasoning, they're justified. These things are damn delicious.

The music and the candy combined made the perfect ending to Halloween night. A candy corn dropped from Cassandra's fingers and rolled across the floor as one of the more somber tracks lulled her into a daze. She barely noticed her head drooping closer and closer to her chest until she was startled out of her seat by the slamming of her room door.

Gasping, she glanced frantically around the room to find it empty, her window open. Papers were flying off her desk and swirling around her room and her curtains billowed out as if reaching for her. Placing her candy bucket on the desk, she shivered and yanked the window shut, grimacing at the goosebumps spreading across her arms and the stale taste the candy left behind.

Her mouth was dry; the remaining sugar made her tongue stick to the roof and sides of it. She opened and closed it several times, trying to swallow back the rancid sweetness. A quick brushing was definitely in order.

The short nap—how long was it, anyway?—made Cassandra incredibly groggy. She decided to make a quick job of brushing her teeth; she could make up for it with a few extra minutes in the morning. All she wanted to do was scrub the sugar out of her mouth, get out of her costume, and melt into her cozy sheets.

She applied a generous amount of toothpaste to her brush and scrubbed vigorously, probably too rough in nine out of ten dentists' opinions, rushing through the process. Lower left, lower right, upper right, upper left. Across the front, both top and bottom. Tongue, roof, gargle, spit. Hastily rinsing out her toothbrush and letting it clatter into the glass cup beside the faucet, she splashed cold water on her face, rubbed off her make-up, and froze in place when she peered over her face towel and into the mirror.

Staring back at her were two faces. Her own—leftover mascara, rapidly paling skin—and a decrepit face she didn't recognize standing just off to the side. It stared her reflection directly in the eyes. It was probably a she; it had thinning shoulder-length black hair and once-feminine features hidden beneath rotting green skin. The creature was overweight, its gruesome body parts sagging. Its only half-decent features were its teeth, exposed in a menacing grimace: though they were yellow, they were unnaturally straightened and filed into neat rows.

Cassandra blinked and dipped her head back into the towel, rubbing over her eyes again. Her breaths were becoming shaky, but she knew it was only a trick conceived of late-night stories and sugar-induced adrenaline. She tried to steady herself as she prepared to open her eyes again.

Funny, she always imagined she would scream and run if she were ever presented with such a situation. Turn around, at least. But, instead, opening her eyes was the last thing she wanted to do.

Her heart wasn't palpitating as movies and horror stories suggested it would, either. Instead, it was beating slowly and deliberately, as if trying to keep itself calm. Like taking deep breaths in a time of panic.

All that was consumed by the expected response as soon as she looked back up.

Cassandra screamed and ran out of the bathroom, hyper-conscious of the heavy footfalls only a step behind her. The wood floors whined under their feet as she whipped around the corner into the living room and headed for the front door. Whenever her parents left for the weekend, her father left a baseball bat beside the front door, something she always laughed off as ridiculous. Now she was thankful as she reached for the handle.

Her fingers only grazed the smooth wood as she was yanked back by her hair. Writhing in rhythm to her screams, she kicked and flailed and grabbed at her roots, trying to pry the hands away. She jerked her body with strength that she was sure would bring down a grown man, but the heavy corpse was unaffected. It gave a violent pull and sent her crashing down onto her back, where it proceeded to drag her across the floor toward her dining room set.

The cold plastic covering the dining room chair stung against her bare thighs as the decrepit woman—she was sure of its gender now, its ancient breasts so close to her face—forced her into it. She groped the area around her for something to latch onto and snagged the tablecloth in the process, bringing down the crystal bowls and candleholders that adorned the table between meals. The woman snatched it out of her hand and used it to secure her to the back of the seat, tying it so tight around her arms and midsection that she struggled to breathe. She gripped Cassandra's hair by the roots again and yanked back, causing her to cough and gasp against the strain of her choker.

Cassandra tried to sputter out a question or dissuasion, anything to get the thing off her, but only succeeded in strangling herself further. She trembled under the heavy lack of oxygen as the woman wheezed over her with her rotting breath. When her muscles started to fail on her the woman let go and retreated toward the hallway.

The house fell quiet as Cassandra paused to listen. There was no sign of movement in the other room; the only noise was that of the raucous contradictions in her mind. What's going on? Is this real? How could it be real? Maybe she was hallucinating. Yeah, because I can tie myself up like a fucking boy scout.

Despite the irrationality of the thoughts, they gave her enough hope to be crushed when the woman came trudging back into the room, sharp utensils in hand. Cassandra recognized the metal pick her mother used to clean her teeth and the miniature mirror that went with it among the handful of murderous weapons she didn't know they owned. She screeched and kicked, yelling for any one of her neighbors who might have been within hearing distance, spitting pleads and then insults at the woman when she wouldn't show mercy.

She grabbed Cassandra's face then, prying her mouth open, and peered inside. Cassandra bit down hard when the woman reached inside to feel her teeth and drew some kind of fluid from the finger as well as the first sound from the walking corpse. The woman gave a low cry and smacked her hard across the face, leaving her to cough up a mixture of the black blood and her own.

Cassandra flailed as her mouth was pried open once more, this time more forcefully, and whimpered in pain as the woman began prodding and stabbing at her gums. She gagged as the blood filled her mouth and she had to struggle to avoid swallowing it.

The woman retracted, muttering something that vaguely resembled "too many sweets." Her expression shifted from angered disappointment to sadistic satisfaction as she reached for the baseball bat that Cassandra only just realized was now leaning against the dining table. She grabbed her by the hair once more with her right hand and held the bat with her left.

"Wait," Cassandra cried. "Why, why—"

The woman didn't wait for the question. She swung the bat back, gaining momentum, and aimed Cassandra's suddenly rotting teeth.

Cassandra's plastic jack-o-lantern went crashing to the floor, sending candy corn and packets of packaged chocolates venturing ambitiously across her room in all directions. Her body convulsed upward as she was ripped from her dream with a rasp cry. Her heart racked against her chest with a force that stifled her lungs and made it difficult to breathe. A dull aching throbbed in her gums and her teeth, which she ran her tongue over hastily. They were still intact.

The room was dark, but empty. The clock read 4:26.

She went to bed that night without brushing her teeth.