Candy at a Funeral (Short Story Version)

“Forgiveness is the fragrance
that the violet sheds on the
heel that has crushed it.” -Mark Twain

When I saw the lemon drop in her prune-y hands I didn’t know what it was for. But Grandma just hobbled over and pried it into my hands. She left me with that gram of candy like it was a piece of God. As if holding it, the rain on the hearse and mausoleums would turn sticky and clear as light. As if the sky would softly bruise blue and hold itself as I tasted it. She looked at me as if the yellow sweet in my hand was the only precious thing I had left in the world.
And I thought, “why not?” popping it in my mouth and thinking with too much time, wishing really. I wished that I didn’t have to dress in this stiff suit. I wished that I didn’t need to hold still listening to adults talk in a cold room. I wished all these flowers would turn their faces around so I didn’t have to look at their huge, violently-colored petals. I wished that people didn’t mull around me, turning away like shadows every time I asked, “What’d you say?” I dreamed up mountains of cream, saw them lining the hills, all snow and powdered sugar. I saw the cemetery and the recent funeral, people moving bouquets, the black streams making their way to cars and parking lots, a hole like a deep mouth, the coffin lowered in. I imagined everything buried, drowned, asleep with a little smile under a dream’s snow drift.
And I thought, “What if nothing was there, nothing? Just…” The great sugar loads pounding the green, puffing the cemetery to a soft nothing. With the sharp tang in my mouth I imagined just one thing, the whiteness of cream, stirred in my head like the pocket of sweet lying under my tongue.
“Myron!”
“What?” I called out.
My brother, Marion, came up. “We’re going,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, biting my lip. It still tasted a little sweet. “Now?”
“Yeah,” he said, “Mom says she’s been feeling better.”
“Well, she’s a liar.” I wrapped my tongue around, tasting the cold side of my mouth.
“Mar-Mar!” A cousin of ours was calling out to Marion. “Your mom needs help getting the flowers. Y’know?” she said, “those bigass orchids? Yeah, she can’t fit ‘em in the trunk.”
He sucked his breath in, curled his fingers, and walked off without even waving for me to follow.
I wanted to go after him, but I knew I’d just get in the way and make him angry. I was no good at loading stuff, or anything else. At home he always did the big things like washing the dishes, making sure the laundry’s dry before we take it off the line, even helping me with homework. Lately though, Mom’s been doing nothing and nobody mentions why. They say “she needs this” or “time will make it better”. Mars just stares at them, like he could put their face in a headlock.
When he heads off, rounding around the rose hedges so I could barely make out his suit waving between the gaps of leaves, I leave, going around to see the lily gardens. When my foot hits the paved walk, I don’t notice how fast I’m going, running really. I want everything to look like a blur and when the sky hovers above me like this I can’t help but feel it’s another relative coming out to see if I’m okay. But I’m not okay. I’m scared. All of a sudden, the paved walkway ends and all I can see is this big funeral wreath with massive lettering underneath. It’s right in the middle of the garden entrance and I want to go in but someone must have forgotten it here. At the very center above the sign with its three-legged stand is an oriental lily. People at the cemetery flower shop call it “stargazer” because it looks always in awe, staring in wonder at the light-streaked sky. Night or day, sun or star, this thing with its big fat flower stands waiting for me.
I push it aside. The stand loses balance and clatters with a bushy fall on the floor. The flowers come loose and I step on them walking over. The lily I give my heel, the very back of my foot, so that when its stem cracks and the petals pool with bruise marks I can be sure. I can be sure.
When I come under the grown-over arch there’s a lush sound of a fountain. It’s one of those classic-looking ones, with spirals and ivy engravings and little Greek gods playing tag around the base. I sit down, waiting, but not really sure what for.
“Myron!” Someone calls my name. He sounds pissed. “Myron, you little dick, where are you?”
“Here!” I choke out. Marion comes into view. His face is puffed up and red looking. Those orchids must’ve weighed a ton. When he comes over he steps on bits of lavender that fell from the bouquet. His face is all twisted up, saying, “What the hell is this doing here?” as he flicks their sticky limbs off his dress shoes. He sniffs, a little miffed by the sudden flavor in the air. It’s a light, brief scent. Like someone waved their dress in the wind and the flowers all breathed a little sigh at the fluttering.
Marion shook his head and socked me over mine.
“Ow, what was that for?”
“For not coming when I called you.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well you oughtta.”
“I didn’t know! How was I supposed to know?”
“You were supposed to come when I called you! Okay?”
He looks down at me, standing over the fountain, the water leaping off the basin.
I say crossing my arms, “I won’t know what I didn’t know.”
He looks at me, the kind of look you give when you don’t know what to do but want to do something desperately.
Marion turns to leave. “We’re going, dickhead.” He tries to grab my arm but the sleeves are slippery and I wriggle out of the way. He’s pinching his mouth shut like I just pissed in it or something. He tries to push me, I guess into fountain, but he moves too slowly and I just shove him back and run around the other side. He chases after me.
“I’m going to call Mom!” he says, like that’s going to scare me.
“It’s not like she’s going to do anything.”
“She’ll beat you down if I do!”
“No, she won’t,” I say, “she forgot how to use her arms. She forgot everything after dad died. She forgot about me, she forgot about you—
“No, she didn’t!” Marion screams at me.
“She’s useless. She’s as good as dead!” I spit the words out, happy to finally say it.
“You shut your mouth!” Marion’s reaching at me.
When he grabs my collar, jerking me up towards his face, I say, “When was the last time she baked a cake?”
He stops and I go on, “Last week you turned fourteen. In a month, I’ll be twelve. She hasn’t moved from that couch till today.”
Marion’s face seems like pond water, trembling as the words skip across and suddenly plunge.
“Dad died a month ago. The bruises are gone. We don’t have to live like we’re nothing anymore.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” he spat, “easy ‘cause you’ve been waiting for him to die all this time. But what about Mom? What are we going to do without her? Have you ever thought about how she feels!”
“Yeah,” I said, tongue feeling sweet all of a sudden, “you still love her this much. All because of a cake.”
“You have no idea,” Marion said, staring right through me, “no idea what that’s like. You were always different from us. Always dreaming.” He turns away and mutters, “It’s like you’re not even there, even when Dad was home.”
I smiled to myself. I knew it wasn’t fair. When Daddy beat me, I cried. Then went away to put on a band-aid. And the pain went away soon.
But with Marion, he always tried to fight back. After a few years, he couldn’t take just letting it happen to us. He tried to protect us. He took the most of it.
“And you’ve got the stitches to prove it, huh? That I don’t love anyone half as hard as you love us.” I smile at him, knowing that it looks stupid, the half-empty curve, the half-empty words. No, he doesn’t love more than I can. He protected us, Mom and me, but that doesn’t mean he can just pretend it doesn't hurt him not to know. Marion’s scared too. Waking up one morning, no one says hi? Scary. Go to school, the teacher tells you “principle’s office, go” and he tells you there in that tiny office, “Your mother called. She said…”. Scary.
And the scariest thing is that you don’t know. You don’t know what it is lurking on your back, sitting in a corner, hiding behind trashcans in the street. You don’t know if the people you met, the places you go, the happiness you feel—
Is that real? Is it ever real?
“I wanna open a candy store,” I say to him. Marion looks back.
“I wanna make a cake. A beautiful one, with all the piping, all the cream frosting with no lumps, just smooth. Chocolate.” Marion looks at me like I’ve gone crazy.
“I wanna make pastries, and taffy, and crème brulee. All the little petit fours, those tiny-ass éclairs.” I look up at the sky, knowing I can do this.
“I wanna make something beautiful. I wanna create something sweet in this world. I don’t want unhappiness to take over my life. I don’t want flowers and funerals to turn me against the world. I want pretty. I want sweet. I wanna be just like a piece of candy at a funeral. A reminder that the world is not ending. That beauty is always there. That candy still tastes sweet.”
There will always be stories like ours. As Marion and I hold hands walking back to the car, walking back to our dead-face mom, our cold-ass house, I think, there are always going to be sad stories. Stories with no light in them, with no real ending. Stories that are mud mud mud all the way through. I want my story to end with a bite of chocolate at the end. I want people to taste the bitter, mix with the sweet, and in the end the bitterness was worth it. Now, you can’t tell the sad from the sweet, the hard with the soft, the medicine from the healing.
Marion looks out the window, out at the green green hillsides rolling down. I wish I could make it rain Skittles and M&M’s. All that color raining down, dot the whole lawn a massive fruity, chocolate rainbow. All the dead and all the living. Till everything was rainbow, rainbow.