Grit Feldman: Candy Detective

This is why I like writing super short fiction. I wrote this a while ago as a quick character piece and came back to it, modified it a bit and now it is a long project I'm working on to eventually read to my sons.  

I was a bad apple from the beginning. A bad candy apple. The kind that goes brown as soon as it hits the air and then sticks to the roof of your mouth until you have to get in there with a spoon and scrape the darn thing off.  I wasn’t in the world for long before my mom realized I was no good and started sending me to a pediatric counselor who kept store bought fudge squares on a table between us.  Like a candied almond left in the freezer - I was a hard nut to crack, but, I suppose every chocolate bar has its melting point and eventually it was my turn after I hit bottom. Rock candy bottom. Two weeks ago on the day after my 11th birthday I got nabbed on two counts of theft,  stealing my particular poison. I’m a bean man. Jelly bean. They threw me in the clink – Sheffy County Juvenile Detention Center after a security guard at Stored Foods caught me filling my pockets with all kinds flavors from those plastic bins. I told him I was just sampling, but he didn’t buy it when my pants fell down from the weight of the beans in my pocket.

Let me tell you, there’s nothing like playing checkers for four hours in the lock down of a juvenile detention center and then two weeks of community service doing puzzle piece inventory for the Goodwill to set a kid straight. You don’t really appreciate freedom until you lose it. And on that day, when I was released  from Sheffy County Juvvy, when I smelled the sweet scent of freedom wrapping over me the way cotton candy wraps around a cardboard cone, I knew it was time for a change. It was then and there I went from being more crooked than a three feet of section of rope licorice to being more straight and narrow than a candy cane. Well, at least the straight and narrow candy canes.

My years of living on the wrong side of the law gave me the experience I needed to help the people most in need. Those silent citizens who fall victim to crimes so often left unsolved and forgotten. Candy crimes.  It was on that day when my mom picked me up from Sheffy County Juvenile detention center and ushered me in our minivan, shaking her head and repeating to herself, “Why on Earth? Why God?....Why?”, that I was no long was Greyton Julian Feldman, troubled youth. On that day I became: Grit Feldman, Candy Detective.