Candy's ghost is who she intends to be, a perfect version of herself. Candy has a see-through side. Her ghost is a prism, only appearing when Candy craves love. She follows Candy around, hoping that Candy's solid self may still someday become someone great, so they'll be able to reconvene, and the ghost will never again have to slink outside, embarrassed for Candy's failures. But as years roll past, and the ghost sees that the same desires Candy had years ago are still pressing, she tags along, worrying about how the past affects the present and how it will inevitably affect the future. The ghost thinks Candy sucks. She thinks Candy will never be legendary. It’s difficult to explain how your alternate can live both in and outside of you. I’m effervescent, and can make anything happen. That’s the ghost. I’m incapable of loving, and magic is a hoax. That’s Candy. Usually, fears haunt you, and ghosts are the failures, but this is the kind of ghost that makes you jealous.

Staring at flowers exacerbated it. You’d never think yard work dangerous, but it did take a good ten years of gardening overkill for Candy's first apparition to emerge. As a child, Candy's mother read her stories about wicked queens who gazed into mirrors until they were destroyed by their own vanity, so Candy kept only one small cosmetic mirror for combing her hair on special occasions. She didn’t want to be limited by her reflected self. She wanted to base her definition of beauty on how she believed she looked, not how a piece of silvered glass perceived her. Besides, she's a witch; her look is flexible. To say the least, as a person aware of self-image, it didn’t occur to Candy that tending plants could unconsciously become a narcissistic hobby rooted in the insecurities she’d worked so hard to overcome.

She was re-settled into her candy house, having maintained the nougat fence posts, cleared leaves out of the honey resin rain gutters, shoveled ash out of the rock candy fireplace, and replaced lemon drop roofing as needed, like a responsible witch homeowner. Time sped up, each year flying by faster than the last, and chunks of it were dedicated to yard work. Candy mowed, weeded, composted, mulched, and watched sprouts turn into trees that now provide for her property a leafy canopy to ward off summer sugar meltdowns. Each season, she had generous harvests of kale, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, pumpkins, beans, and turnips, perfect for Christmas gifts, since she doesn’t eat vegetables. Eventually, she began to question why she was compelled to grow them.

One morning, Candy was pulling volunteer mint sprigs out of the lamb’s ears patch, when she noticed Pinocchio slumped against her shovel, resting against the barn wall. His face was bloody, and his blood was dripping down her shovel’s handle. Candy worried she was hallucinating and considered halving him with the obvious implement, as if the bloody shovel foreshadowed his killing. He would make nice woodchips for the path she’d just dug through the herb garden. Snapping out of murder mode, Candy realized somebody was bleeding to death, and ran over to help.

“Are you okay?” She asked. A bloody film obscured the lenses of his eyes.

“Water,” he murmured.

Candy turned the hose on its most gentle spray setting and squirted him. As red ran into the soil, his tan skin emerged, then green lederhosen and black boots. He had no nose. Instead, he had a hole there as if he’d been shot.

“Are you Pinocchio?” she asked.

“I cut it off,” he said.

Candy carried Pinocchio inside, wrapped him in towels, laid him in an armchair, and fed him fresh butterscotch. He fell asleep, and Candy noticed how young he looked. In human years, he was seven, but with his face, hair, and costume painted on he looked five. The whole time he slept she watched him, wondering about the disfigured puppet visitor. Pinocchio awoke four hours later.

“I was sick of my nose growing,” he said, starting conversation. “So I cut it out. I wanted to be a skull.”

Pinocchio’s Violent Ghost, she said to herself. Come to teach me something. She was still piecing it together.

“Where do you live?” Candy asked.

“I’d rather be dead,” he said, “than live in that fucked up puppetry studio where any fuck can come in and pay top dollar to buy me as a sex slave for their perverted whimsies. I may just be a wooden doll…”

To escape his brutal life as a wooden prostitute, Pinocchio had borrowed one of Geppetto's hand drills, cranking away until a dowel fell out of his face. He wanted to maim himself so people would leave him alone. It took six hours, because he was oak, a difficult-to-carve hardwood. Since he didn’t take himself to the emergency room for stitches, he now had a chronically bloody wound. He'd left town, planning to die in the forest where he could decompose with other oak things. But he kept on living, homeless, in the woods, for the past six months. When he lost too much blood, he got disoriented, stumbling around until passing out and eventually regaining consciousness, usually in some streambed or ravine.

He’s not dead, Candy told herself, buying mental time to decide whether or not Pinocchio was invited to stay. It was hard to believe that Pinocchio had been having sex since he was a toddler. This thought made Candy a little horny, not because he was young, but because he had such an active sex life. Candy figured he’d found her because they had something to give each other. Not sex. Why else do people meet? It probably wasn't love. Was she fated to marry a fairy tale character missing a proboscis? Candy thought not, but decided, in general, that if she persevered through whirlwind encounters with freaks that she'd build enough character to finally meet someone who wasn't so complicated.