Leilanie Stewart

The White Kaleidoscope

Leilanie Stewart © 2016

I was fifteen years old when I was first struck with the desire to eat church candles. The notion swept over me as I slaved away at the till in the department store where I worked every Saturday for a paltry £1.50 an hour.

When I say church candles, I’m talking about a very specific breed. The big, thick, creamy, delicious kind that look like squat marzipan tree trunks. I’m not pregnant, nor deranged; at least, I wasn’t the last time I psychoanalysed myself. I’ve always craved unusual objects. In fact, now that I think of it, my adventuresome palate has landed me in trouble once or twice in the past. Once, being when I masticated the yummy looking psychedelic balls of wool in the dusty classroom cupboard in my nursery school. Twice, being when I chewed my mum’s favourite pair of red leather stilettos. In hindsight, it’s a bit strange that my pleasant, straight-laced obey-all-the-rules mother had such incriminating shoes hidden in a brown paper bag in the cupboard in the first place.

But we’re straying from the point. And I do have a point, believe me. What is it about society that preconditions people to think that only certain items may be deemed worthy enough to be slobbered over? Just think how wide the limited range of foodstuffs would become if we only thought them worthy enough to fill our mouths with? It’s like Neanderthals. How can people possibly have a say about them, when they haven’t met any? You might think I’m being a tad unfair. Of course, we don’t all have time machines that we can just dive into at any given opportunity. But I don’t believe in the words ‘an educated guess’. What rubbish! How can you claim to understand the wider picture when you don’t gather all the data to make a fair judgement? It’s like saying that you understand white when you don’t even know the primary colours that make it up. Red, yellow and blue, for that matter. That one I learned from my beat up old encyclopedia. Learned about Neanderthals in there too. Just before I partially digested the book.

I hope you don’t mind listening, because I don’t mind sitting here and letting the stream of consciousness take over me. Let’s get back to candles. I’ll tell you how this ‘fetish’ of mine started. There used to be a young married couple who lived several doors down from my parents house. They didn’t have any kids, so they bought two cats and fussed over them as though they were children. I remember how I used to love those cats. The feel of their soft fur and delicate bodies was soothing. I loved running my greasy little hands over them.

But I made the sorry mistake of trying to feed some salami to the neighbours’ cats one day and it didn’t go down well. Not my fault, I was only nine.

~END OF EXCERPT~

This story is included in Diabolical Dreamscapes: Strange and macabre short stories.

Ebook available for pre-order for £1.99/$2.99:

‘The White Kaleidoscope’ – First published in Carillon Magazine Issue 27, July 2010.