Sweet Rot by Fiona Verity Higgins

My son, Tommy, chomped down the toffee apple with the unthinking greed of a child who’d never learnt control. His cheeks puffed out sticky with sugar and caramel, the glaze catching the carnival lights like a fragile shell. Lopsided on its stick, the apple was too big, and yet he kept bringing it to his lips again and again.

I stood beside him, stiff and immobile, a man running out of ideas but clinging to this one, a last chance. I’d tried everything. Slimming clubs that mocked him behind closed doors. Meal plans taped to the fridge, only to be ignored. Padlocks on the cupboards that he had broken open with a hammer from the shed. I’d sat outside his bedroom door, night after night, listening to the crinkle of wrappers, searching for answers in the dark.

Once, I cried in the kitchen on my knees while he stood there, face blank, chewing through a whole box of doughnuts, swallowing my hope whole.

Still, Tommy grew. Year after year, he swelled, more of him, more weight. There was no holding it back. And when I looked at him, all I saw was what he would become, gasping for air at forty, crippled by fifty, gone before sixty. The fat was a quiet death, creeping like ivy over stone.

I hadn’t spoken a word since handing it over to him. Just smiled and said, “Go on, have a treat.”

I’d found the stall by accident, or maybe it found me. The sign simply read “Sweets” hand-painted in thick, bleeding red, still glossy in places as if freshly done.

No queue, no music. Around it, the carnival buzzed with laughter and clanging bells. The stall smelt of burnt sugar, wet earth and the sweet, sour rot of overripe fruit. The man behind the counter wore a spotless, white apron, his yellowed nails twitching like brittle roots on the wooden counter. His smile was tired, thin like he’d worn it for too long.

“I’ve got a son. He’s always eating. Always hungry. It’s…”

He nodded slowly, like he already knew.

“Special batch,” he said. One bite’s usually enough. They won’t kill him.”

He smiled then. “In the centre, incubated in heat. They take what he doesn’t need.”

What he didn’t need. I clung to those words like a prayer. How I wished that were true. I had wanted it to hurt. Not too much, just enough to make him change.

I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t want to. I took the remedy, handed over the cash, and walked away before I could change my mind. Later, I gave it to Tommy.

But the truth is, I’d handed him a curse with a popsicle stick through the middle. The first bite was sweetness and fire, sugar melting sharply on his tongue. They were alive twisting beneath the candy glaze, in their sweet cocoon. My fists clenched, my jaw locked.

Please, let it work. Then, came the pause. The look of confusion on his soft, dimpled face as he ceased chewing. His voice cracked- thin with fear.

“Dad…This one’s different. It hurts.”

Tommy’s gaze dropped from the apple to his belly, his fingers trembling as they pressed into his flesh, as if he was trying to feel the thing that had begun to move inside him.

He cried out, the plea slid up my spine like ice.

“Daddy, help me. It’s so bad.”

I wanted to run to him, but my legs wouldn’t obey. The words curdled in my throat before they could even rise.

Tommy collapsed, gasping and convulsing in between choking sobs. His fingernails broke the surface as he frantically tore at his stomach, now a mass writhing under his skin. It was working as the peddler had promised, starving parasites bred to eat fat. Mindless, tapeworm beasts from somewhere older than science and nastier than magic.

And I had paid for them. They ate.

His belly caved inward with a wet, whumpf, loose flesh over bone. He screamed, a raw tortured sound that didn’t belong to a human, more like an animal’s last cry.

“Daddy, pleaseee, it hurts…!”

Then silence.

I knelt down beside him, hands shaking, holding onto what was left. His chest rose and sank in ragged, shallow breaths. Flesh that was pared away, bones sharp beneath paper-thin skin. His mother’s eyes, glassy and distant, rolling upward in their sockets.

The parasites had eaten him down to a shadow. A husk. My boy-gone.

“Forgive me, Tommy. God, forgive me. I never meant to…”

My hands grasped at what was left, the loose flesh pooling around him like spilt wax. I crushed the half eaten apple beneath my heel, sugar and blood mixing in a sticky mess.

This was love, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?