By Ryan Duke
You know you’re on the wrong side of Candyland, way, way west of the Chocolate River, south of the Ice Cream Mountains, when a gross goblin, in a ghastly green flash, shows you her tits.
Now look, you’ve been stuck outside in the frosty fresh wind blowing cold out of the Peppermint Forest, waiting forty minutes for the Jelly Bean Bus to shuttle you back to King Kandy’s Castle, thinking every ten minutes my sweet sweet ass. It sure doesn’t look like one’s coming anytime soon since it’s doubtful the caramel shocks can handle the potholes in the peanut brittle street.
This is the kind of area that King Kandy promised to fix with his Gingerbread Housing and Urban Development Plan, but the new Praline Projects only made things worse. Gingerbread is an overrated building material. Cheap, sure, but it can’t stand up to the weather in this region since all the raindrops are lemon drops and gum drops and all the snowflakes are Hershey bars and milkshakes.
You can see the boxy gingerbread high rises with graham cracker boards over broken windows and the blue flashing light of the Pecan Police observation camera at the street corner and know you’re in a bad way. You don’t wanna be here, but this is where your licorice dealer lives. You still can’t believe that King Kandy decreed his brother Lord Licorice was a villain and outlawed his brand of tasty treat. Despite his majesty’s royal ruling, you can’t get enough of the stuff. After a few sample licorice whips with your dealer, “sucking” as they call it, you’re totally sugar high. But that jittery feeling in your veins, arms, legs – that creeping paranoia – is made worse by the cold.
Look at you. Dumb little sweet boy, all alone on the gross part of town.
You can see a few of them. The gross green goblins. Foreigners here from Nastyland looking for work wherever they can find it. They’re short and gooey, like snotballs with legs and arms of incongruent length, sometimes walking, sometimes rolling sticky to the ground. Their bodies have no separation from their heads. It’s just an odd, roundish, undefined mass of yuck. They smell like armpit and they don’t have anuses. They literally shit where they eat. There are some goblins on the corner. Probably selling licorice or sourballs, you think then try not to think because you don’t wanna be sweetist or anything. You wanna be open minded, but you couldn’t tell one goblin from the other if your life depended on it.
There’s a goblin across the street staring right at you, her booger green skin looking ever more sickly under the orange glow of a candy corn streetlight. She notices you trying not to notice her, so she calls out to you in a mucousy gurgle you can’t understand, “Wanna khit luk-hee?”
Against your better judgment, you reply, “What did you say?”
She wobbles across the street, her legs squishing in and out of the holes in her fishnet stockings with each step. Black straps of garter belts disappear beneath a short red skirt into reaches you’d rather not imagine.
“Sorry,” she gargles, “my candynese is bad.” With a quick shuffle of her hands she adjusts her black lace bodice, making a sound like spreading jelly on toast. Standing next to you and reeking of mustard and bad milk, she asks again, “wanna get lucky?”
You can tell by the size of the ring pop on the sixth of the seven fingerlike digits oozing from her left hand, by the way she twirls the high-grade candy necklace that hangs between her off center cleavage, and by the thickness and freshness of her red, green, yellow, orange gummi worm wig that this is a very experienced and successful hooker. “No thank you. Just waiting for the bus.”
She looks down the street one direction, then the other. “No bus coming, baby. But I’m right here.” She tells you then puts one foot up on the bench. Her kneeless leg not bending, but curving, showing off the goods. “Lick your lolli for a chocolate coin. Get your lolli sticky for milk money.”
“Really, no thank you, miss,” you say as your eyes search the darkness for anything to lock onto.
“Whatsa matta, baby?” Like squeezing a tube of toothpaste, she presses in the sides of her bodice until she plops out of the top. There they are, your first goblin breasts, looking like someone dropped a gelatin mold and it separated into two, wobbly, uneven pieces. She grabs her raisin nipples and sloshes them around a bit for your enjoyment before stuffing them back into her bodice. “You know you want this.”
“Sure, sure I do, I just don’t have any money is all.”
Her laugh sounds like blowing bubbles into chocolate milk. “You look like you got money, sweet boy.”
“I don’t have much, I promise you.” You pull your blue cotton candy cardigan sweater close around your shoulders. She looks at you sideways like a shopper at a bad melon.
“If no money, then licorice. I lick your lolli for a whip.”
She knows! you think. She knows I’m holding. She could turn me in to the Pecan Police, if I don’t give her what she wants.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” You’re nervous and a bad liar.
“I lick your lolli for HALF a whip.”
You start to walk away, to another bus stop, but she follows you, shouting “Whatcha rotting problem? You sweetist or something?”
Yeah, maybe I’m sweetist, but I don’t go gross, you think as you walk harder, getting away. Turning a corner you spy a bus heading to the Chocolate Swamp, a long way from the castle, a long way from here. You take a quick suck of a whip before waving the driver down. Just another icky night in the gross part of town.
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