“Candy From a Stranger”

I’m the Candymachine Man. I guess you’d say I fight crime.

You’d be wrong, though, because I fight evil, which is different than crime in many important aspects. This makes me a superhero, only I am a superhero in the sense of Batman. I have tools and skills and tremendous mental discipline. Not some power that comes from the sun or from a radioactive bug, both of which are reprehensible.

I also deliver delicious candy to children. I get it from my candymachine. It is a big and heavy candymachine, made of steel and brass. I picked it up from the lobby of a government building and it has three separate chambers for candy, only one of them is broken now. Also, I have long since modified it so that you do not need quarters to make it work. You just have to turn the knob. Also it is big and heavy and good for beating in the skulls of sinners.

I wonder, sometimes, if I am a sinner. After all, the candymachine did not technically belong to me in terms of the law. I reassure myself that, actually, it always belonged to me. I think that if something always belonged to you — and you will know in your heart if you are honest with yourself what such a thing is — it is not a sin to take it. I knew in my heart that the candymachine was mine the moment I laid my eyes on it. It was all steely and brassy and colorful and it was the part of me that had always been missing. It is if anything a sin that anyone else had it in the first place. Because it is part of me. This is what I mean about the difference between crime and evil.

This does not mean you should just go around taking anything you want and making this excuse, lying to yourself. Nobody has that much stuff that’s part of them. I — perhaps I alone — am honest about it. A man who did not understand this once tried to stop me from having my candymachine, the candymachine which belongs to me. What he did not understand is that since the candymachine belongs to me, that is theft. But it is okay, because he has been dealt with, and he was not an especially bad person in any case. Just a sinner, like everyone else except the children. And me.

I do not like it that children grow up to be sinners. I try to stop it as much as possible, but there is little I can do. It does my heart a whole mess of pain to know that one day I will be giving candy to a child and then, a couple of years down the road, I will be forced to deal with him like the sinner he has become. I wish that one day a child would not become a sinner, but except with me, that has never happened. So I give candy to children and I teach them an important lesson: Never take candy from strangers! Except from me, because I can be trusted. Not like the sinners of the world who would poison children with tainted candy. This is yet another reason they should all be destroyed.

My candymachine has two ends. The shiny and colorful end for children, and the hard metal foot for sinners. And sometimes it can be difficult to tell the difference between them, but that’s okay, because I have been blessed with uncommon perception, the knowledge of which end of my candymachine the people should receive.

It is a tough job, in other words, but I am up to the task.

I am the Candymachine Man. I fight evil.