The gumball machine has stood outside “Martinez Toolshop” since the handmade building was erected by two hopeful men under the weight of family and of the hand-splitten logs carried between them. 

This gumball machine remembers before others know and it has twisted sickly sweetness into the stomachs of every growing customer to feed the hungry store. It remembers the capsules poured into its glass belly, taken to the back of the store by the son of the two hopeful men. It remembers the son carrying a drooling, soiling customer behind the counter and into the back room. The customer never comes out.

The son forgets to take payment from the customer. He pushes a coin in and takes a capsule. Soon, the son is forgotten. The gumball machine remembers how the son smiled, nodded at the grandson, and patted the grandson’s milling head as the son forgets his own history. Patting, the son forgets the unpaying customer of years ago and remembers only his own righteousness. He rots on a noose in the closet.

The same customers greet the grandson. They are grown now, older than the wandering, curious child will ever be. They forget the son and his red eyes. The grandson has filled the emptied machine with jawbreakers, and he has placed the gumball machine on display outside with a sign reading: “Here Since Founding”. Boys and girls play on the sandy, swirling roads outside in hot Arizona air and they giggle, each attempting to stuff a coin into the gumball machine.

The grandson now hobbles, still wandering, but forgetting his own memory in the blackened storage that houses his father, his customers, and his grandfather all at once, rotting in a fruity and saccharine aroma. The paint flakes—the grandmother no longer tenderly wipes the glass each time a sandstorm passes. It cannot recall the powdery capsules that once filled its interior as it rigidly remains, firm, unwilling to remember before others.

The grandson forces a coin down the clouded gumball machine, slurping on a jawbreaker with his fifteen remaining teeth. 

He turns the lights off, humming. Before exiting, he squints at each door and finds one he has not noticed before. The grandson finds a skeleton behind the counter, stuffed into a locked janitor’s closet. The sweet scent strikes his airless throat, and he turns away, falling. His hand sticks to the ground as if a syrupy goo straps him to the mopped floor that reflects a musty, cobwebbed wooden roof. 

When customers stop by the next day, the lights flicker. A second cousin maintains the shop, but only after remodeling the wood to industrial steel. 

The dusty gumball machine refuses to allow another coin in. Only a few sticky remnants stay now, melted by an old, sweltering sun. A girl it once knew clutches her pregnant belly, and not a glance is shared. The new shopowner shakes off dust, candy unsticks. But the metal resists. He sees himself in the clouded glass. Inside, the sweetness thickens.