Hiding in the alley across the street, the man watched the girl and her mother as he rolled the contents of the Pixy Stik around with his tongue to coat the entire inside of his mouth. It was a great secret that when you didn’t have Pixy Stix, but instead had only one, that’s what it was called—a Pixy Stik. Even the people who made them didn’t know that. The man, on the other hand, knew everything there was to know about anything that contained sugar. Candies, toffees, and chocolates. Cookies, cakes, and pies. He even knew all the different types of sugars. Granulated and brown, both light and dark. Powdered and confectioner’s, raw versus cane or beet, all of which have their differences. Even sugars like spitjump and blusterbilly, which no one ever heard of. He knew so much about sugar that his teeth were almost black, and his skin had more pimples than pores. His great love was sugar. Yet here was a child playing carelessly with her sucker, waving it in the air and banging it against her stroller. It would serve her right to drop it. And that’s just what he was waiting for.
While the mother was busy with her book, sitting on her bench with one hand on the stroller, nudging it forward and back as if hoping the slight motion would be enough to keep her child occupied so she could continue reading, the man stalked across the street unnoticed to come up behind the two of them. He did his best not to appear suspicious. It helped that they were sitting at a bus stop, making him seem like just another person waiting for the bus. The girl, two of her pudgy fingers hooked through the white loop, was still banging away with her sucker. Fortunately, her puny little arms were too weak to do it any real damage, but it was beginning to seem uncertain she would drop the thing at all. That is, until she looked at her mother, making a noise that went unnoticed, and with her next swing bumped her hand on the padded bar in front of her in such a way that it jarred the sucker loose, sending it tumbling onto the concrete.
The man had an unnatural gift for finding candy. He could hear a Tootsie Roll being unwrapped in heavy traffic. However, he, of course, had been waiting for this very moment, and so he stooped and snatched up the sucker in his hand, quickly wedged it into one of his bulging pockets, and was again pretending to stare across the street before the girl even realized she had dropped it.
After a moment, when she did turn, she naturally looked surprised to find him standing there. He thought to run before the sight of him would start her bawling, as it always did with children, but for some inexplicable reason he lingered, just long enough to realize she wasn’t afraid at all. Nor did she appear sad to be missing her candy. Instead, somehow still unnoticed by her mother, she giggled. Was she laughing at him? He couldn’t understand it. In truth, the girl was laughing at something else, something the man wouldn’t have believed even if she could have told him. His pockets were always so full of candy, he didn’t know that he had a funny-looking mouse living in one of them.
Vermillion wasn’t always funny looking. In fact, he wasn’t usually called Vermillion either. The little girl he used to live with had a mother who named him that, but she was a mean and angry woman, and what she always called him was Vermin. When her daughter wasn’t looking, the woman would pick him up by the tag on his tiny red collar and let him dangle in the air squeaking. If she was feeling especially mean, which was almost always, she would squeeze him and make his eyes pop out, and now they were stuck like that. That’s why he ran away. The man, of course, was equally horrible, but at least he always had food in his pockets. And he hadn’t found Vermillion yet.
The girl was staring at him now, making him feel perhaps a little more funny-looking than usual. Except it didn’t really feel like she was laughing at him. It wasn’t at all mean. It felt pleasant, the way she smiled, as though she liked him. It even seemed as though she wanted him to know that. There was something special about her. In a way, even dangerous, though not to him. At the moment she was happy, but he was beginning to suspect the man would soon regret taking her sucker.
While her mother was still reading, the girl just kept staring, smiling and laughing, so the man figured he might as well make his escape. He stepped back slowly, hoping she would continue with that silly look on her face until he was far enough away that once she did start crying, which she surely would, her mother would have no reason to suspect that he was the cause.
It didn’t work out that way.
He made it only two steps before she seemed to realize what he was doing, and her face completely changed. At least, that’s what he thought was happening. Despite that she had not taken her eyes off of him, hadn’t so much as glanced around to find her sucker, he was sure that the girl knew he had taken it. Vermillion, too, saw the smile leave the girl’s face, and assumed she only wanted her candy, so he wiggled his way back into the pocket, found the sucker with the little white loop, and pushed up from underneath it as best he could. After a short struggle, it popped loose and fell back to the sidewalk.
The man, of course, heard the candy drop. He didn’t know why it had fallen from his pocket, but now he was sure he had been wrong about why the girl had become momentarily upset. He was sure because she didn’t seem merely upset anymore. After glancing at the sucker laying at his feet, and apparently recognizing it as her own, she looked angry. Never before had he seen such a face on such a small child. He turned and ran, and could feel the girl’s eyes on his back.
It was this feeling that made him trip.
Vermillion, too, had a feeling, a feeling of falling, which, of course, was exactly what was happening. The instant he realized it, and being in one of the man’s front coat pockets as he was, he was certain he was about to be crushed. He began to scramble, struggling to climb out of the pocket so he could jump to safety, but with the way the man was suddenly flailing about he was pinched between all the pieces of candy.
The ground was rushing up toward him, the gray sidewalk the last thing he would ever see, but just when he thought he was going to go splat!, there was a sound like someone dropping a big balloon full of rocks, and all at once he was free.
Vermillion found himself on the ground surrounded by more candy than he had ever seen. The man had disappeared, but the mess he left was much, much more than just the candy he could have carried in his pockets.
Vermillion scurried over and around all the bits strewn across the sidewalk. When he was clear of it, he saw that the little girl was smiling and laughing again. Of course. Her sucker was right nearby.
Vermillion picked it up, and began to carry it back. Holding it in his mouth by its white loop, he climbed first onto one of the stroller’s wheels, then up one of its legs, and then he jumped inside and sat in the girl’s lap. With his little hands he held the sucker out to her.
The girl ignored it.
Instead, she picked him up, much more gently than he would have expected considering the way the mean and angry woman used to squeeze him. Then, she rubbed from his forehead to the top of his nose with one tiny finger, and smiled.
“Ew, Carma, don’t touch!” her mother suddenly screamed, giving her hand a light slap. Carma was the girl’s name. Actually, it was Carmella, but they never called her that.
Vermillion fell back into the girl’s lap and ran to hide behind her leg while she shouted her babyish complaints at her mother.
“Oh, no, look,” her mother said, interrupting her. “He’s got a little collar on.” Coaxing him out of hiding, Vermillion trusted that she wasn’t going to hurt him, and after gently picking him up she read the tiny tag dangling from his neck. “It says… ‘Love’. Oh, honey, this is someone’s pet.”
She began, then, to look around, the expression on her face one of a person trying to find another person who’s lost a mouse.
There was no one else around.
“I suppose…” The girl watched as her mother smiled. “I suppose we’ll just have to take care of him.” Just then, the bus turned the corner. “It looks like we’re not going home yet, sweetie.” She placed Vermillion back in her daughter’s lap. “I think there was a pet store down the street. What do mice eat? I wonder.”
She stood and pointed the stroller down the sidewalk. After a short distance, she was steering the wheels around a big mess someone had made.
“Where did all this candy come from?” she said.
And Carma giggled.