"Stash"
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It was astonishing how creative and ingenuous Willy saw himself become with hoarding candies: sneaking sours into his coarse tweed pockets, slipping lollipops cleverly up his sleeves, tucking cherry liquorice down his tall socks, slashing bedpillows with scissors and pouring zillions of little toffees inside, dropping chocolate bars behind furniture, smuggling a kludge of sugarplums in pencilcases, and even ripping up those loose floorboards in his gloomy bedroom and leaving a glimmering gallimaufry of boiled sweets and ivory-white chocolate boxes under the floor.
A squirrelly, hyperactive flurry of stashing and stockpiling possessed Willy, leaving his brain to feel flashingly topsy-turvy and his nerves electrified with a new kinetic energy. It was a manic energy, the sort of insane drive that pushes lunatics to lift school buses with their bare hands or jump off buildings, believing that they have the power of flight.
At first it had only been the chocolates, but now the obsession grew to a broader frontier. Saccharin sweet sugar candies, trickling treacle, taffies that stretched like elastic, lollipops with gum shelled inside hard candy, chewy gummies of splendiferous flavors, velveteen-tasting wafers that dissolved gorgeously on your tongue, smooth as silk gumdrops that rolled soothingly around your mouth…
Before this grand imaginative explosion, Willy could not for the life of him remember a time when he had been so wildly enthusiastic about something like this. In fact, he had really never been very creative; he was once quite a dull, drained-out, unassuming little boy with a ghost-like, willowy kind of presence that drew most people to pity him on the spot. He sat in corners (his headgear pulling up his lips to unveil a forced and twisted metal grin), fiddling with things pointlessly, scribbling drawings but never completely finishing them off… his mind was always an anonymous blank, a big bottomless labyrinth of boredom and aimlessness…
Even at Halloween, while the excited congregation of neighborhood kids had lathered themselves in stick-on pumpkin stickers and sparkles, borrowing their mother's opera lipstick for painting on gushing clots of bright blood and their father's shoe-wax to darken their hair to vampiric perfection—Willy had merely cut out two holes from an old tablecloth he'd found in the cobwebbed attic and threw it over himself to hide his headgear. This was the best he could think of.
But everything was so deliciously different now. His mind was suddenly a rich reservoir of fancies that dazzled and twanged his senses when they popped and splashed up to the slivery surface of his imagination. Honestly, Willy was baffled how this overflow of marvelous hallucinations and fresh notions had been able to stay tightly bundled-up deep in a vault inside of him for so, so long.
Although that might have puzzled him, Willy knew perfectly well why things had gone counterclockwise… it was the creamy chocolate candy, it had some flourishing ingredient that caused him to snap like a gingerbread biscuit. Or, not snap, but ooze with a happiness and readiness towards the world. A mad tornado had rushed through him, uprooting absolutely everything he once was. The floating, dying ghost-like manner that had hung about Willy before, now vanished—and was replaced with a blinding eagerness to taste everything he got his mits on and, now, his little life had an arrow, a magnificent compass pointing towards tranquil creams, raspberry truffles, and shimmering jelly…
Though, naturally, there was trouble in paradise. Once or twice, there were a few horrific near-misses with Father's ever vigilant patrol. Times when Willy would have to scramble to shut up the floorboards holding the lustrous treasure trove of sweets before Father (who lately was radiating with suspicion at the visible change in his son) prowled into the room were growing more terrifyingly frequent. A new-found annoyance had augmented and formed bitterly between Willy and his father—it was a mutual annoyance, subtle, itching… irritating like a rash.
One time, when Willy strolled past Father while fantasizing about the scintillating similarities between yo-yos and lollipops, and, perhaps, how the two could be jumbled together for a candy… his father extended a powerful hand, stopped Willy by the shoulder very coldly, and flared out one of those drearily stern looks that seemed to pierce through his boy's very soul and spotlight every single frivolous day-dream and smother it underneath a stone-cold, lifelessly sterile glare. Willy twisted in discomfort, feeling eerily as though his father was actually reading his mind like a magazine. A disquieting change rippled over his father's face, a hybrid look of half-shock and half-resentment. Sniffing the air with a grimace and with a murky glint of suspicion in his eyes, Father had smelled the distinct smell of sugary toffee. Willy knew that his father had an awfully good nose… good noses ran in the family, after all… but, thankfully, this close-call had been diverted by the cheerless tinkling of doorbells while a patient came into the parlor to get their braces removed. But, it had been close…
Sometimes a seething-hot feeling would briefly bubble up in the deepest pits of Willy's stomach, soaking him with a thick, furious nausea towards his father for being so icily controlling, for that dry quietness that strangled like a noose, for those bleak looks he shot starkly at Willy that seemed to advertise blatant disappointment…
But scarfing down chocolate fixed all that. Away those gray feelings went, whisked in a goldenly sunny, toasty warm whirlwind. Chocolate fixed everything, it seemed. It lifted Willy up light as a feather fluttering about in a spring wind, careless and free and relishing everything single particle around him, every knick knack reminded him of some toffee—or, just recently, the thrills of inspiration caused him to formulate little recipes of his own.
Yet, intuition told Willy that the secretive mishmash of marshmallows, the hidden wads and globules of tasty taffy, and the crowded conglomeration of various chocolates wouldn't stay undetected from Father for too much longer. An undercurrent of frozen glares and nipping irritation was on the verge of a volcanic explosion, but Willy wouldn't stop—rather, he couldn't stop— having his candy around him, surrounding him. Even though he would tense up stiff as a plank of wood when he heard the thunk of his father's polished leather shoes march down the dismal portrait-lined hallway, Willy couldn't manage to tare himself away from the succulent and divine warmth of his secret stash.
Word of Disclaim:
No own, no sue.