Morton Presents An Excerpt From His Well-Regarded, If Little Known Literary Epic "Red Licorice."

Once inside the candy shop, I stumbled and shuffled, half-mad with the perfume of the place, joyful, yet raging, for I was angry at the audacity of its existence, having only just emerged from the unsweet mud that caked me through my own child years and not ready to be confronted with the sweetness so abundantly available to, it seemed, every other child in existence, every race and creed and every capacity, given the freedom to enter here and fill themselves with the joyful scents, shades and flavours of hope and possibility so fully that, senses engorged by indulgence, they emerged into the blinding afternoon sun themselves shining, candied with it, the joy, hope and happiness, the sweet rain falling on all. And so it was that I knew what colour licorice I would buy. Not the bitterness of black or the strangeness of green or blue, but red, sweet blood red, red to remind myself of the unsugared days of blood and spit and hard earth and sweet to engender hope, fleeting, soft, sugary hope, ready to be washed away in the next dark rain, but, for now, sweet and good. And once I had those red vines in my hands, I ate them all, all of them, for that is who I was then and what I hungered for.