Candy Wrappers

We're down to the hard candies now. The more choice pieces of Hallowe'en loot got consumed over the week-end; non-dairy, autism-friendly diet be damned. The miniature candy bars were the first to go: exotic mixtures of chocolate, marshmallow and goo that had about three different wrappers but all tasted exactly the same.

Next were the chocolate eyeballs--that coloured foil was difficult to remove, but the fudge and caramel innards made it worth the trouble. We had so many of those things because the neighbour dumped a motherload in the bottom of the stroller when we returned from making the rounds. It's hard to gauge just how much candy to buy, and the neighbour overestimated. Last year, though, the kids kept coming for hours--the last ones drifting by at a little after ten--and we almost ran out of candy. This year there seemed to be far fewer kids, hence the mountains of leftovers.

After the eyeballs were the "taffy" candies. They look and feel more like plastic, and the flavours can't be based on anything found in nature. But we ate them, hooked on the spike they produce in the blood sugar, riding the white-death roller coaster.
We savoured the chemical chew of the taffy because we could see what was coming next: three jars full of bubble-gum centred lollipops and a handful of hard little candies rolled in plastic. The Rockets are easier on the teeth than the Sweettarts, which are, indeed, tangy, as the cellophane packaging claims. I'm crunching on the last roll as I write this, my brain swimming in the sugar high, and I'm dreading the inevitable downturn that will leave my nervous system flat as a collapsed spongecake.

Who would have thought, looking at the heaps of candy at our disposal a week ago, that tonight would find me slinking off to bed with a couple sticky little suckers, their wax paper wrappers glued to the candy from exposure to kitchen humidity? But the trail of discarded candy wrappers has led, inevitably, to this moment, and the time will surely come when the suckers, too, will have disappeared. What, I ask you, will become of us then?