Cotton Candy

It’s supposed to be an innocent thing. Light, fluffy, its very appearance a promise of delicate sweetness waiting to wash across your tongue.

Kendra doesn’t see it. Kendra sees a nest of spider webs, the tangled strands of a witch’s hair as she leans it to take a bite of your tender flesh.

Lucky for Kendra, she’s been assigned to work on the kettle corn side of the concession stand this summer. Unluckily for Kendra, Ben is out sick, a fever stealing him away from the oven hot tent.

She hesitates when Nick waddles her way, his belly sloshing over pants threatening to slip down to his knees. Kendra knows what he’s about to ask, about to demand. She also knows she can’t say no.

Saying no would mean saying goodbye to the relatively cushy summer job that is going to buy her a car. It would mean watching someone else step into the tent and up to the copper kettle she has grown to understand.

So Kendra nods. She nods and wipes her hands down the front of her smock. It looks like she’s wiping away popcorn dust, or traces of oil, but really Kendra is drying her soaking palms.
All of her moisture has traveled there, leaving her mouth desert dry, her throat the surface of a cactus in the sun, coated in sand and spines.

Kendra swallows hard and steps closer to the large silver pot, not unlike her beloved copper one. This one isn’t as deep, and has a tower projecting up from the middle of the bowl. It almost smells the same over there, sugar drifting through the air. But Kendra misses the rich note of butter cutting through the saccharin.

Kendra turns to ask Nick how exactly to work this thing, but he’s already moved on, yelling to the bearded man at the supply truck to bring him more popcorn.

Kendra sighs and wipes her hands again, then reaches out to touch the machine. It’s cool now, sheet metal in the shade. And it’s not the problem. The problem is what she’ll use it for, what they’ll make together. She slides her hand down under its belly and presses the black button.

A rumble pours up from its belly, a blast of hot breath from the tower. Should she have poured the sugar first? Unsure, Kendra scrambles for the carton that is filled with superfine, superpink sugar instead of the milk you might expect to come from such a shape. She shakes a little into her hand, then lifts it to her mouth, her tongue darting out to sample the fruitless sweet. So innocent.

What magic happens in that tower that takes this deliciousness and transforms it into terror?

Kendra’s hand drops, taps the silver basin. Immediately, she jerks it back, her brain imagining that its scorching hot before processing that the heat is only carried by the breeze twirling out of the tower.

Again Kendra wipes her hands, passing the carton from one hand to the other before stretching to tip the carton, sending a stream of pink into the mouth of the waiting beast.

Four long heartbeats pound all the way to Kendra’s toes, driving the blood from her brain and leaving her light-headed. Then the first of the faintly pink tendrils appear, twining out from pinpricks that race to the top of the tower.

Kendra stands still, staring, mesmerized by the fog beginning to collect in the bowl.

“Twirl it, girl.”

The shout pulls her out of the fog, Nick’s voice a beacon breaking through to her. She picks up a cone, seeing the paper unicorn it could have been a horn for. Worried that Nick might yell again, or just tell her to get out, Kendra slowly turns the cone over to hold it by its pointy tip.

Armed, she pokes at the webs clustering in the bowl. They grab hold immediately, clinging tightly to the unicorn horn, threatening to tug it out of her grip. They might pull in her hand, her arm, crawl up to surround her head and suffocate her. So Kendra moves, running the horn around the silver basin, collecting the webs in a mass of sticky air.

It begins to tip, to pull away from the paper cone. If the blob escapes, it might begin to crawl away, maybe pull itself out of the machine and and push her onto the floor. Kendra almost lets go of the cone, sending it down to die in the webs of despair. But the image of the car she wants catches her, forces her to lift her hand and the cone with it.

The webs pull free of the mass left in the big silver belly as Kendra twists and turns the cone, raising it to her eye level. Separated from what’s left behind, it almost looks innocent. Faintly pink, it could be sweet candy, or just blood-tainted witch’s hair. Did she pull this from a machine or yank it from the head of a woman determined to eat her tender flesh?

Kendra shudders and turns, moving to place the cone in the stand on the counter. She finds that she can’t quite let go of the cone, can’t quite nestle it into the hole in the stand, leave it behind to dry out a bit before being tucked into a plastic bag.

She thinks for a moment that it’s her imagination. That she has thought so many awful things about the treat that her mind has begun to believe that it’s truly evil, and frozen her hand to the cone.

But her fingers won’t release it. She shakes her hand, loosening the webbing. The cone stays put, a single spider falling down onto her hand.

Kendra screams.

Nick doesn’t even turn around, just reaches into his pocket to pull out his phone. “It happened again,” is the last thing that Kendra hears before the venom kicks in.