Why Kabobs Wear Oranges — Under the striped roof of Booth Seven, someone kept snatching Vesper’s candy kabobs before the evening rush. Read the full story →
Under the striped roof of Booth Seven, someone kept snatching Vesper’s candy kabobs before the evening rush. She slid marshmallows, cubes, and jellies onto sticks as fast as the calliope wheezed from the carousel, but each skewer leaned, bumped, and rolled toward the floor. Vesper wanted them to stand straight in the display bucket by sunset. The sticky sugar dust smelled like lemons and warm paper, and her fingers made tiny squeak-squeak sounds on every wooden stick.
She checked under the gummy bowls. She checked behind the marshmallow tub. At last, a soft clink came from the place nobody bothered to search: inside a flat, plain orange-slice candy that had been used as a spacer. Vesper held it to the light. Hidden in the clear sugar was a tiny star-shaped bead, heavy as a pebble and bright as a lantern. “So that’s your secret,” she whispered.
She slid the orange slice onto the middle of a wobbling kabob. The stick balanced at once, as if it had found its own little moon. By nightfall, every candy maker on the midway was adding a round fruit slice to keep the sweets steady. Ever since, candy kabobs wear oranges in the middle—and if you spot one tilted just so, you may wonder what little star is hiding inside.
