Sour Candy Commentary
SPOILERS AHEAD!
“They make us bear their children.”
Kealan Patrick Burke’s short story Sour Candy is an immediately-scary nightmare of non-consensual parenthood about chance encounters, the ravages of being a parent, and the terror of being stuck and helpless.
While on a hunt for candy at Walmart, Phil encounters a screaming child with his brow-beaten mother. After accepting a piece of sour candy from the child, he unknowingly walks himself into a curse. When leaving Walmart, he gets into a car crash with the mother, who then throws herself into traffic. Thinking the incident strange but nothing else, Phil goes home, only to find the child waiting for him. Daddy he calls Phil. Everyone— the cops who investigated the suicide, his coworkers, his neighbors— all reinforce the child’s game: He’s your son. Yet Phil is resistant. He doesn’t want children; he broke up with his ex-wife over it. The child bends reality around Phil to convince him he’s wrong, he’s crazy. But as Phil dives deeper into the magic at play, he finds himself stuck in a horrible cycle of death and rebirth, a cycle of forced parenthood, part of a system much larger and more ancient than him. As the dread of Phil’s helplessness mounts, the author cuts through with a moment of relief, only to snatch it away again, leaving us with our mouth open.
What I find most interesting and unique about this story is the way the child is portrayed. Easily enough, a writer less talented could fabricate the archetype of a horror-story-child with demonic power, in an attempt to make it scary. What Burke does is humanize the child, leading us away from the certainty of some horror tales where an evil-doing child must be gotten rid of, instead toward a trembling question throughout: is he really Phil’s child?
When Phil finally confronts the child for the first time in his home, alone, we get the unexpected.
“When the boy smiled, it was so sincere, so genuine, so child-like that it gave Phil pause. He had come here expecting confrontation, hostility, perhaps some dramatic demonstration of the boy’s power now that they were alone. Some act of aggression befitting an unnatural monster. But not this, not the kind of smile expected of a normal, happy child. Not for the first time since this all began, he felt a peal of doubt resonate through him. What if I’m wrong? What if I have lost my mind and this is my child? Could this be what happened to ordinary parents when they snapped and murdered their children? Did they stop knowing them, convince themselves that innocents had become monsters?”
While forced to be the child’s father, Phil’s body slowly fails, as he is only allowed to eat the sour candy stocked in the house, after the child distorted reality and removed all other foods. The curse destroys him body and mind, stripping him of autonomy, until Phil questions if he should kill the child to free himself.
As a child-free person in an increasingly fascist America, Burke’s Sour Candy grabbed an especially tender part of my soul and throttled it. Though there is relief in the fact it’s fiction and not real, I can’t shake the very real feeling of being trapped myself. It begs the question, will I be forced to have children, too? Am I cursed like Phil? The reasons people hold for being child-free are multitudinous, but the one Phil speaks to is a loss of autonomy. As my reproductive rights are being similarly stripped away, I understand fearing such a loss. “They make us bear their children.” Reading this realization made my heart sink. It’s the fear of having children one doesn’t want and of being stuck with a child one doesn’t know— raising something else. The horror of knowing the only way out is death.