The world’s largest candy store has looked over the flat prairie lands near Jordan, Minnesota for over a century now. It’s an immense building, or a series of buildings connected by cheaply constructed passageways that were put into place every time that the business needed to expand due to the increasing volume of candy seekers coming along Route 169, quite intent on filling up bags full of whatever traditional or exotic candy they fancied.
When it was built back in the 1890’s, it was just a shack. Pretty much everything on the prairie was a shack back then, most likely. Settlers to Minnesota had very impolitely pushed the native residents off of their land and driven them away so that they themselves could occupy it, plant corn and wheat and potatoes, build Lutheran churches and open up hardware stores, groceries and bakeries. Nobody back then was necessarily thinking of a giant store just for selling candy, but they did sell penny candies at the dry goods store. I guess that’s how it started.
At the center of the World’s Largest Candy Store near Jordan, Minnesota, there lies a secret passageway that can be accessed by removing the rug in front of the gummie worm wall and opening the hatch, which reveals a rickety staircase leading down into a hot and dusty basement. It might have been a root cellar at one time, providing the right temperature and humidity for storing all of the potatoes they were growing on the land there. Also, perhaps, bins of turnips and rutabagas; the Swedish turnip they called it, so starchy and bland, yet so tasty and nutritious if cooked the right way.
Whatever its provenance, it was no root cellar anymore, not since Lars Ingebretsen’s granny had died at 95 years old, leaving her last bushel of potatoes down in that cellar. Rumor has it that they were still sitting there to this day, still dry and ready to be eaten. But there was no way of knowing the veracity of this rumor unless you were a bona fide member of the Secret Swedish Sauna Society (SSSS) that now owned the candy store and used the hidden underground bunker for their club activities.
The candy store was just a front and if you looked closely at the employees, so friendly and cheerful, you would see the strange similarities in their skin tones and subtle smirks that they shared with each other throughout the day when a customer would say something that was somehow significant only to them. Look closer still and one could glimpse a small salamander tattoo behind all of their left ears, the sign of bona fide membership in the SSSS, secretly sunken below the World’s Largest Candy Store.
If you were somehow fortunate or perhaps unfortunate enough to one day descend those stairs, you might be slightly surprised to not see any saunas. It was indeed hot enough down there already without the saunas, and the SSSS had gone through a bit of mission creep over the last half a century, leaving behind the ritual of sitting and sweating in a small steamy shack, just as Lars Ingebretsen himself had left behind has Grandma’s sweet sentiments for the Swedish turnip!
Lars had led the seamless segue into Swedish saunas and built his little community of friends, siblings and their offspring, who subsequently grew up in a sweetly special but sweaty community of shared governance, no one certainly sure who’s kids were whose and no one really caring. Now it was Lars’s own grandson, at least he suspected it was his, this young boy who, in fact, used they/them pronouns, so maybe not a boy really; this young person named Sent, or Scent (no one was quite sure of the spelling) had somehow seamlessly shifted the secret society to a new venture altogether, something significantly successful.
Sent was raised in the candy-store sauna basement society (don’t call it a cult; anyone is free to leave anytime as long as they don’t spill the beans). Lars had left the care of Sent to whomever was able and willing to do it, completely indifferent to the development of children, in fact. Like many leaders, Lars was led astray by his power, as the number of acolytes increased and the sales figure of the candy store skyrocketed, his head grew too big to fit in the tiny sauna that he favored, the one under the staircase. Lars would spend hours steaming inside going over the sales figures on his ipad and investing money in various initiatives that were to his liking. Others were none the wiser to the goings-on inside Lars’s tiny electric sauna, his head pressed up against the ceiling.
Sent soon caught on and decided to act, to take the reins and turn the horses in a different direction. After spending most of their childhood sampling all of the various candies in the giant store, when Sent hit puberty, they got really serious. Some SSSS members thought Sent would grow up to be a fat dullard due to the candy addiction, but this was not the case. Sent also was really good at computers. Really good. As grandpa Lars was getting more and more eccentric and unreliable, Sent staged a steam-powered sauna-style coup that changed the SSSS forever. The candy store also changed and finally embraced the fascinating trendy appeal of Asian candies and sweets.
Once Sent/Scent took over, the saunas were dismantled and repurposed as computer stations with a nice built-in heating feature, good for the cool, damp basement. Lars was exiled to the original farmer shack out behind the candy store, his power of attorney assigned to his only living sibling, Aunt Glo over in Gaylord. Sent got the 5G hookup into the basement, installed solar power on the candy store and started growing organic vegetables out on the farm. All of the SSSS members were given coding lessons and before long, the hacking operation commenced.
Using a little known feature in the Orange Watch, the SSSS (which now stood for Surreptitious and Seditious Supercomputing Scholars) hacked into manure mogul Marco Suckerbarf’s giant financial empire and turned it all to dust. There was soon nothing left and all the monopoly of manure mulching machinery was auctioned off for pennies on the dollar. Suckerbarf went insane and spent his days livestreaming conspiratorial rants that nobody watched.
After that successful strike on the superstrata, the SSSS went to work on it’s next target, hacking into the self-driving computers of the hordes of Momadon delivery vans that were clogging up all of the streets and roads, delivering dogfood to the substrata. Once they gained control of the GPS piloting system, the SSSS caused all of the vans to self-drive themselves into ditches where they were rendered immobile and eventually rusted and rotted away like old farm machinery.
Sent/Scent and the secret warriors of the SSSS were lauded as heroes by the smart and sensitive sub-section of society, a small sample size, granted. They were, however, reviled by the law-enforcement knuckle-dragging defenders of the empire (an even smaller sample size). The candy store eventually discontinued candy sales and went into pet food, to make up for the loss people felt at first when they couldn’t get it delivered to their home anymore by Momadon. The SSSS came through with a new business model, bicycle delivery of fresh organic pet-food, at reasonable prices and with special discounts for loyalty club members. Indeed, this turnips to candy, saunas to supercomputers to petfood saga is a hidden, below the surface tale that only a few cognoscenti are even aware of. So lackadaisical we are in our awareness, the earth shifts and we don’t even realize it, which usually can prove costly. Sometimes, though, the shift can imperceptibly bring some joy to young and old alike as we while out our days out here on the prairie.
THE MOSSY BOG 