The dish of hard candy

The dish sits at the corner of the reception counter, close enough to the sign-in clipboard that the two are sometimes touched by the same hand in the same motion, one for a name and one for a small assurance that the wait includes something sweet. Individually wrapped, cellophane twisted at both ends, the candies come in four flavors by the manufacturer's count, though only three are ever meaningfully depleted by the end of a week. Butterscotch goes first, usually within a day. Peppermint follows close behind. Cherry lasts longer, taken mostly by children who mistake the color for something else. The strawberry ones remain, week after week, refilled less often than the others because so many are simply carried over, a small pink surplus accumulating at the bottom of the dish beneath the newer arrivals, which are themselves eventually strawberry too, since that is what gets reordered when the bulk box runs low on everything else. Nobody has said, out loud, that they dislike the flavor. The evidence sits in the dish instead, unclaimed and slightly dusty at the wrapper's fold, outnumbering every other color by a margin nobody set out to create. A dish that offers four choices and receives, in practice, three, is still doing most of what was asked of it. The fourth flavor simply waits, patient in a way nothing else in the room quite manages, for a hand that reaches past it out of habit and, every so often, doesn't.

Marion Vale