Denial Moose Tracks (or Trax)

is not a real ice cream.

Stop saying that.

There is no Denial State Park in Alaska.

Although there could be.

People in a state of denial could wander there for years.

Leaving obvious moose tracks.

Lumbering through lives.

Carrying an imaginary axe.

You taste like chocolate.


A Fairy Tale: Once, there was a woman who fell in love with a candy bar. "Candy Bar, Candy Bar, when will you come to me again?" she would ask and lean out of windows on the 47th floor or the 79th floor, as coworkers ran screaming to pull her in. But Candy Bar only came to her in the middle of the night, which is the only time he allowed her to unwrap him. The woman would always take her time in removing the outer wrapper that bore his name. She thought that was so funny. That he had his name on his clothes. Then she would tease him terribly when she removed his foil wrapper, trying not to crinkle it up while she did so, which drove Candy Bar mad. She knew he would have to put this back on, and if there were too many wrinkles, there would be questions. Then at last she would lie with him, throwing her arms around him, and occasionally massaging an almond in his back with her fingers, so strange, while he lay atop her and dripped a little into her mouth. The woman was fascinated that he also had his name written in his chocolate, but of course it had gotten distorted and blurry after their many encounters. His name was rather ghostly by now. The woman loved to lie with him all night and Candy Bar could last for hours if you knew how not to bite him there, not to raven, not to consume. Candy Bar could hold out. It was some sort of confectionary tantric trick that drove the woman mad. But always when morning came, Candy Bar would change. He would begin to turn vanilla. At first, the woman tried to figure out the strange magic of this food chemistry. On the occasions when Candy Bar would drift off into little islands of sleep between their bouts of lovemaking, the woman would feel for a flashlight she kept hidden under her bed and try to study the process. She would always think of the myth of Cupid and Psyche and shudder. Once, she caught him at the exact moment when the process was just starting. His back exhibited a mottling of white across his delicious caroby skin. It looked like Michael Jackson in one of his "vitiligo" phases of chemical peeling. The woman found herself recoiling, but just then Candy Bar snapped awake and stared up at her. "What are you doing?!" "Nothing," she whispered apologetically. And just like that he would be back. All the white in his skin would disappear, and Candy Bar would console her. "You're white," she said just once to him. One night, just before morning dawned. "What are you talking about? You're crazy!" he laughed. But it was true. She had seen him turn white as dogshit left out in the winter. "How can he not know?" she would ask herself, as she lay back in the bed, propped herself against her soft mountain range of pillows, and watched him dress himself for his other life. First the foil--which she often couldn't resist helping him straighten out, smoothing down a wrinkle here or a fold there. She felt so much his wife when she spruced him up like this. Then the wrapper, which he had to fairly wriggle into, often by sitting on the end of the bed and stretching out. The woman often felt the desire to pull him back into the bed at exactly that moment, but Candy Bar would always shake her off, as though she were a hungry child or a senile old woman, who would surely indiscreetly chew him up. This disturbed her. Some days she just wanted to tear his foil to bits, rip up his wrapper, and then see what he would do. But she knew what would happen. Candy Bar would quit her. He would leave her apartment anyway, even naked. It didn't come as much of a surprise to the woman when Candy Bar finally divorced his wife, a rather unappealing, very conservative pretzel covered in white chocolate. But what did surprise her is that he left his wife for another piece of candy. Not her. Apparently, Candy Bar had been seeing a very demanding and psychologically troubled jujube on the side. Was that what she did wrong, she wondered? Was I not demanding enough? She had thought she had been too demanding. Maybe it is the psychotic nonpareil which gets the sprinkles, she thought. Who knows what else he dropped sleeve for, the woman finally admitted to herself one day, and her face became a mask. She knew better than to look in the mirror when she was thinking about Candy Bar. Like so many mythological monsters, her passion for Candy Bar could turn her to stone. How many weekends had she spent as a marble statue, unable to pick up a phone. But how it all ended. Candy Bar had left his wife and the woman at the same time. In fact, he left the state. The woman and the wife never met, although each knew a few stray details about the other. Neither wanted to know more. They were both strong, smart women who just happened to have poorly insulated dreams. Candy Bar was weak. Weak chocolate. "You melt anywhere," she told him after he had dealt her one of many disappointments. He didn't deny it. The touch of a hand always started the process. Candy Bar's notorious melting. He could fool candy into thinking this was his "feminine side," a softness that needed nurturing. But she eventually knew. He would never take her on a vacation to a sunny island. She could never make love to him in Acapulco or Spain. Sometimes she fantasized about kidnapping Candy Bar and taking him on just such a vacation, sitting across from him poolside in Mexico, wearing her huge Sophia Loren sunglasses and the red sun hat with the ridiculous brim, while he melted into a puddle on the concrete. "What's wrong?" she would ask, while staring straight ahead, not deigning to look as his wrapper would appear to be suffering the bends, and Candy Bar would double over. "A little hot for you?" But the woman was a realist. She went on with her life, after a few midafternoon bouts of singing out of the upper story windows at work. Or was that shouting? She realized the arms of her coworkers pulling her back into the building were sanity, after all. One day, many years after the end of the semisweet affair, the woman was sitting on the verandah of her much-envied Prairie style home and didn't hear something one of her sons had said to her. She was remembering the time Candy Bar had taken her to a fondue pot. She hadn't really seen herself as someone who could appreciate the swinging lifestyle, but somehow Candy Bar had brought out many things in her that seemed the very opposite of her nature. Now she wondered if she had really done this just for him. Allowing herself to be contoured and shaped. She had been shameless in pretending she could be as sexually brazen as any man. She had masculinized her justifications. Oh, she was still a woman. She knew how to dangle herself at the appropriate times. She knew how to make chocolate soften. Had she really wanted to go into the melting pot that night? Part of her certainly did. She was young and curious. She would always be curious. She knew it was a gift. Her curiosity. She remembered how strange it had been to melt in the pot, and not know whose molecules were whose. What candy was it pleasuring her in front and which in back? She blushed without realizing it. Remembering this. But of course, she remembered the horrible consequences of the Edenic fondue. She had awakened one morning to find a raisin grafted onto her cheek! She could still see the horrible image, see herself in the dentist's chair, hear the whispering of the hygieniests which began to purr and thrill through the little dentist's office like gossipy dove coos. They were telling one another! About her mouth. The raisin! Everybody was talking about the slut in the chair! The dentist was still droning on in a monotone about what could be done, but even on his face she thought she saw a mocking smile. Was she imagining it? She began to babble something about lunch, and pulled the blue paper fastened by a tiny beaded chain, like the pen chain at the bank, from around her neck and slid out of the chair. She ran out of the office and into the street. She was huffing and wheezing suddenly as though she had asthma (she did not) as she tried to dial Candy Bar on her cell phone but she was fat fingering every digit and crying. Although she knew this was prohibited. This daytime call. But. She called a stranger. She began explaining, spluttering, babbling her horrible story into a stranger's ear. And the man said, "What?" And the woman said, "What?" Then they both said, "Who are you?" And then she realized. And she hung up. And then she knew. She knew. She knew everything. At that moment. Which was this moment. Sitting on her verandah. Ignoring her son. She stopped ignoring him. Which Roman poet was it who said that passion is a form of madness? She laughed. Her son asked her what she was laughing about, and of course she said, "Nothing." It wasn't nothing. Nothing is ever nothing. Until it is. She could guess what Candy Bar looked like by now. She knew time would not have been kind to him. Even when she knew him, he had begun to leave miniatures in different states. She thought of those tiny spoons with the names of states that some women collect. For some unfathomable reason. She laughed. "That's your life, Candy Bar," she thought. Your women. Your loves. Those little spoons. All over the country. You can buy them in truckstops. In restaurants located near caverns where you probably take your kids on underground walking tours. On the rare occasions when they see you. Miniature golf courses. Airports. Near dinosaur bones. The woman was beautiful now and far into her life. She enjoyed her beauty for the rest of that day. Enjoyed others enjoying her beauty. She had no idea that it was on that day that Candy Bar died. Of a nut attack. Candy Bar didn't die alone. Of course not. Why would Candy Bar ever be alone? That was the others. Candy Bar died in a cheap motel while a fifteen-year-old Puerto Rican macaroon teased her coconut shreds in the bathroom mirror. He died in a room he had rented by the hour. The woman would only learn of Candy Bar's death seven years later. By then, she had become a celebrated author. She dedicated one of her strangest books to Candy Bar, but she dedicated it in a way that nobody but she would know. She used a name she had used only on late nights, in a room which existed now only as that strange floral essence that seems to inhabit the first snow of the year, when one smiles and believes that anything is possible, exists. And of course anything is possible. We are all candy."