Trembling With Fear 2-16-25

Candy Anne, by Adam Hannah

I own a motel: four words that got every woman wet. 

“Right off the highway,” she would purr, her winking sunglasses black as asphalt, one finger twining a strand of her red hair. “Just down the road from where we sit chatting.” 

The locals watched, then looked away—as long as she didn’t mess with one of their own.

The one time she did, she paid for it. 

###

The kid walked in just after dark. Ten years old. He held a pump shotgun over one arm and when he came into the lobby, he just looked at her. The gun pointed sideways, at the magazine rack. She sat behind the front desk, ankles crossed, book in hand and porn playing on the little TV mounted on the wall. She paused the porn; didn’t drop the book. 

“Help you?” she said. 

The kid wore a greasy white tank top and basketball shorts. 

He said, “You got my ma.” 

“In a room? Pretty sure they’re all vacant tonight.”

He just said it again, “You got my ma.” 

Well maybe. She peered at him through her sunglasses. “Who’s your ma?”

“Candy Anne Lindon.”

Name like that rang a bell. She saw: bleach blonde, cherry tramp stamp, screaming when the manager bit off her ear. 

The manager frowned. “I’d move on,” she said, watching the barrel which now pointed at the floor. “Find yourself a new one. Better yet—find a dad, though I hear those are in short supply.” 

“What’d she ever do to you?”

“Walked by. Hey, you want to see a trick?”

She made all the lights go out. Even the stars. Dark like the kid had never dreamed dark could be. When the lights came back, his face looked the same but there were tears on it. Outside a truck went by on the highway. Lonely sound. 

The manager said, “Wanna see me do it again?”

Kid said, “She was my ma.”

Manager pictured him as a clay figure with wire inside. Wire holding him up, cold and hard and razor thin. 

“Tell me,” she said and made him tell. Came to her quick, his life—the squalor, the mobile home with its vinyl floors and the dust on the inside of the windowsill. Coyotes howling in the night, his little heart like a punch-sore fist in his chest. And Candy Anne didn’t come home. Milk went bad in the fridge. Flies came buzzing. 

But Candy Anne sang to him almost every night—her love was calloused but he knew it was real. She wouldn’t leave him. 

What happened—how did it come to him? It came slow, but he knew it deep down from the very first night: Candy Anne liked redheads. 

The manager let go of his mind, the lobby reasserted itself around them. His narrowed eyes poured water now, hurt in him almost something she could feel. 

“Fuck you,” he gasped, and the gun trembled. 

She put the book down at last, her shoulders dropping as she laid it on the desk the way a human might sag after a sigh. Nights out here were long, and yes, she filled some of them the way she filled them. The rest she kept free for amusements. But his pain didn’t amuse her. 

She took it from him.

“What’d you just do?” the kid said.

“Better, isn’t it?”

And then the gun turned to face her. 

Funny, because Candy Anne seemed a little vague. A little drifting. Maybe at home, he picked up the slack. 

Dry-eyed, he wanted to know, “Did you torture her?” Big word he held awkward in his mouth. But she could see he knew what it meant. 

“I saw,” she said, “Candy used a belt on you. Buckle first.”

“Shut up.” Out of his mouth like bad-tasting spit. 

In the mobile home, the TV stayed on all night—canned laughter, Candy Anne asleep in bed holding a cigarette. Him taking it out of her slack hand and hating her for a moment, staring spiteful at the fillings in her teeth. 

“Want a tour?”

He followed her with the gun at her back.

Peeking into one of the rooms, warm with wood paneling, he said, “Did you do it in here?”

Only the best for Candy Anne, she did it in the honeymoon suite. Mirror on the ceiling, heart-shaped bed. Red shag carpet hid just about everything. Candy didn’t say anything before she died, but right there at the end her eyes narrowed, and recalling it now the manager thought it was one of the kid’s expressions, borrowed from him and put on to feel tough as she stepped over the edge. 

Should have let her go on home.

Then the manager felt tired. Out in the breezeway next to the vending machines, she said, “Better have it out now, I think.” Hole in the ground she wanted to crawl into to sleep. 

“Yeah,” he said. 

“Go ahead and rack the slide.”

“I will.” Ka-thunk.

“Well?”

“She was my ma.” 

“I don’t know what that means.”

He shrugged, Well.

He shot her in the chest, one big boom she didn’t hear until after the impact, which she didn’t register until she was on the ground. Then, flat on her back on the concrete, she saw the hole between her breasts. 

The kid moved to stand over her, red light on him and all around her the sound of the vending machine hum. 

“Just remembered,” the manager said, staring up at him. “She did mention you.” 

“Don’t lie.” He said it the way an adult might have told her to stop rubbing salt in the wound. 

“You gonna shoot me again?”

“I got another shell.” He lifted the shotgun once more. 

“What was it like, having a mother?” She genuinely wanted to know. 

He put the barrel to her stomach, said, “Like this,” before he pulled the trigger. 

###

Took her two weeks to stop coughing up buckshot. She left the locals alone after that. Sometimes he rode by on his bike and she waved.