Carl simply gritted his teeth as he cried until the punishment was over. When she was done, his mother sat abruptly in the living room’s one easy chair and pulled Carl up onto her lap. “Honey, someday you’ll be big and smart enough to get all this stuff. But you have to wait until that day, do you understand?”
Carl didn’t particularly, but he nodded his head anyway, because neither of his parents ever talked to him in such an adult fashion. The seriousness in her voice surprised him in a way the punishment had not.
“There are those on the top, and everybody who’s below them,” she instructed. “If you get to the top you can call the shots. In the meantime you keep your eyes open for what’s going to be yours, do you understand?”
Again she asked an unanswerable question. Carl wasn’t sure what the proper response might be, neither then nor later.
His mother did something else that surprised him. She lifted him off of her lap and set him back down on the floor in front of her. She fished something out of the top pocket of her apron: it was the wrapper of the stolen candy bar. His mother had smoothed the paper back out and ironed it so the Mars© logo and lettering were plain to see.
She placed the candy wrapper in her son’s open hand and closed his small fingers over the edges. “You hang on to this Carl, and put it in a safe place. You go look at this every time you think about stealing something you see in a store.”
A year later his grade school science class studied the planets. Carl confused the candy bar with the workings of the solar system. For a short but intense time, somehow he identified the act of the theft with the order of the Cosmos, a feeling he never entirely shook off as an adult. It didn’t matter how hard he tried or how much more he learned and knew as the years went by; the feeling remained.
NOTES: – from my short story “Carl Possessed” in Broken In: A Novel in Stories. © Jadi Campbell 2012. Go to following link to order my books: https://www.amazon.com/author/jadicampbell
I’ve worked as a massage therapist for the last 30 years, licensed in both the USA and in Europe. I reckon I’ve probably touched 1,000 different bodies. [1] I’ve massaged the following people:
NOTES: [1] They say for true mastery you must perform a technique 1,000 times, on 1,000 different bodies….
He passed a large skating rink and a children’s train track. When he wandered under an arch, Guy discovered a Christmas Market. His inner child gasped with delight.
Rows and rows of wooden market booths had been set up to create lanes.
At last distracted from visions of doom and gloom, he watched a gigantic nutcracker swallow a continually rotating nut.
A larger-than-life music box twirled on a roof top, the ballerina and her dancing bear partner going ’round and ’round. Real fir boughs and even little trees bedecked the stands.
The roofs were wrapped in shiny paper with tinsel ribbons and bows that transformed them into oversized gifts. Big Saint Nicholases drove twinkly sleighs pulled by reindeer whose heads bobbed.
Guy looked at their pale flames and shivered. Flames, like those of a crash site….
We hired a driver and sweet young man named Ley to guide us around. We made an outing to Paksong on the Bolaven Plateau, home of small, superb Laotian coffee plantations. 
On our drive back we stopped at a market hall. Taxis were filling with local workers who stopped to buy groceries. 
Rows of vendors sold grades of rice, 
eggs, fresh fruit, coffee (natch), bolts of cloth, dried fishes, 
vegetables and herbs, freshly cooked food and plastic bags of marinades and sauces.
The variety of fresh produce is tremendous: alone in these photos I can identify three different sizes and shapes of eggplant, tomatoes, cilantro, parsley, Thai basil, oranges, peppers in every size and grade of hotness, cucumber, bitter melon, carrots, zuccini, onions, garlic, bok choy, green and Napa (Chinese) cabbages, ginger, limes, long beans, shallots, spring onions, chives, squash, rose apples.
Women from the hill tribes had wares for sale. An older woman had set up a stand away from most of the others. Curious, I walked over.
She had images of the Buddha, and items for religious and medical purposes. Talons, hooves, 
deer skulls, 
bundles of herbs and animal horns. 
The pairs called to me on some strange level…. “What are they for?” I asked. Ley explained to me that they are placed in a home to protect it and the family that lives there.
