Hard Candy

In the manuscript a middle-aged woman (single, childless)
looks after her crotchety father. He has shot someone,
but not to death, or maybe he took the buckshot to the gut.
Everything’s so Southern gothic: all the thriving plants
and humid swelter, old wooden houses with dilapidated steps

leading up to porches complete with creaking swings
and buckled plank floors that cover cool, dank spaces
where stray dogs and feral animals—opossums, say,
or raccoons—shelter from the heat or hide out overnight.
Fact is, it’s been decades, so I can’t recall the plot. What I read

was a work in progress, first third of a first draft, whose writer,
a close friend—a middle-aged woman (divorced, childless,
her parents deceased)—mailed it to me for critique. It was
good! I cared about the woman and her father and what
adventures might ensue, and the drama was dark

with humor, my favorite blend. But a doctor with a minor part
had paragraphs of detail and dialogue, a long scene better
clipped to exposition or dispensed with altogether.
Meanwhile, the father lacked dimension and description;
an ornery old cuss, he came across as plot device, not

major character. I made my critical notation and mailed
the manuscript back to my good friend. She had
the softest hands I’d ever touched, long legs, a coltish
stride, a guffaw for a laugh. We laughed a lot. I petsat
for her gray tabby tomcat—read Blood Meridian aloud,

beginning to end, while I lay back on her couch and Buster
purred and kneaded biscuits on my chest. She taped BandAids
over her nipples every day—she told me, didn’t show me.
She liked to stoke my lust. One day I climbed her ladder
to clean her gutters. Dirtied the cuffs of my bomber jacket

as I scooped mounds of leaves and cool, wet muck
and flung them to the ground. We went most everywhere
together. I always drove. When “Kashmir” came on the radio,
she cranked up the volume and grinded on the bucket seat,
that lucky thing. I wished it were me. Once at a party, she

sat wriggling in my lap and regaled my guests while I
thought about the live wires of her bare thighs touching
my own skin. She strung along three men I never met.
Nothing wrong with that. When our friend cheated
on his marriage and described the lesson he’d learned

about performing oral sex, we felt sorry for his wife—
not because he’d strayed, but because for thirty years
she’d suffered inept cunnilingus. How we laughed after.
We laughed and laughed. She cried when I confessed
my love for her. She loved me too, but not like that. Still,

I fantasized about laying her down in her sunny bedroom
and slowly peeling off the BandAids, swirling her nipples
like hard candy on my tongue, stroking her breasts
and belly with my face as I made my way down between
those long legs and proving I knew what to do. Did you see

what I did there? I gave each character the proper amount
of detail according to the size of their roles. That’s all I wanted
her to do when she revised her novel. When I fell in love
with someone else, my friend wept bitterly that I’d turned
away and everything was suddenly Melanie Melanie Melanie.

When I brought up her three paramours, she had to concede
hypocrisy. Anyway, I mailed back her manuscript with a long letter:
mostly praise, a lone suggestion for revision. If she ever finished
her novel, she never published it. I never heard from her again.
She closed the book on us, ended with a cliffhanger.