prompt: hum, title: the candyman can't in misc. flash fiction

Charles Bucket peaked in his early tweens, somewhere in the first couple of years after he won that chocolate factory. Well into middle-ages, everyone still called him “Charlie” except for his employees who at least called him “Mister Bucket” to his face, though he knew behind his back it was Charlie, always Charlie, never ever “Charles”. Just some unaccomplished kid stuck inside his flabby old inheritor body. It’s a hell of a thing for the greatest adventure of your entire life to come when you’re still just a child, it’s all downhill from there, like a magic elevator high up in the sky, doomed to drift down from above, hitting the ground with a whisper, not even a grandly memorable thud. That was his life, a feather in the sky, pretty when it rode high, comfortable in its looping downward glide, but when he landed, part of the earth again. Street garbage, at best.

After Wonka died (or possibly just faked his death, that ability to fake infirmities suggested he could fake mortality too) and the factory was no longer shielded by his celebrity, the lawsuits started. From the other kids in the Golden Ticket competition, horribly mutilated as they were for no sin other than the capriciousness of youth. The class-action by the Oompa Loompas once they realized they should’ve had paid-time-off and health insurance instead of just a cot and a weekly ration of cocoa. Oh God, the endless troubles and all in Charlie’s lap.

Even now with legitimately-paid employees, the place still makes money but with all the liens and lingering judgements, not enough profit for him to enjoy any of the trappings. No one would ever want to buy that whole mess off him and, God, he didn’t even have a junior high degree to show for it, he dropped all that for his chocolate dream immediately. There was nothing else he could ever try to be, not when he couldn’t walk down the street without getting red paint thrown at him by the still-begrudged protestors sympathetic to the Loopma Anti-Defamation League.

He got his ticket, all right, and got stuck on the ride.

The assistants down the hall from Charlie’s office say his mind’s so broken by the weight of unearned dreams fulfilled too soon, hours go by where all he does is hum, words occasionally formed around that faint tune. Something about “pure imagination”. The help reckoned it was a song about wishing for a wealth unfettered by responsibilities but, really, it was about the life of a paperboy working his way up to middle management in the Tribune’s distribution department. Subsistence upon his own terms, difficult but simple, unheralded but straight-forward, possibly ending with a golden watch and a handful of people who’d respectfully call him “Charles”.

There’s all the chocolate he wants, of course, but it’s all just as cooling ashes in his mouth. The mansion, yes, and the title and all but nothing will ever make Charlie’s world taste good again.

Last updated May 09, 2021