I tear open the packet and the smell reaches me before the candy does. Cherry. Artificial, bright, impossible cherry. The kind of red that never grew on a tree. The kind that belongs on bicycle handlebars, stained lips, and summer afternoons that seemed too long to ever end.
I tip the crystals onto my tongue.
Instantly, the first explosions begin.
Tiny detonations. Tiny stars collapsing.
A crackle at the tip of my tongue, sharp and electric, like stepping barefoot across static-charged carpet and touching a doorknob. The cherry blooms across my mouth, thick and sweet. Creamier than I remember. Softer around the edges. The old Pop Rocks from childhood felt more like broken glass made of sugar, crisp little shards that snapped and fizzed with a kind of reckless enthusiasm.
The candy settles into the valleys and ridges of my tongue, and each crystal seems to have a mind of its own. One bursts near the center. Another behind it. Then three together like distant firecrackers skipping across a neighborhood on the Fourth of July.
The popping spreads through my mouth like rain finding every crack in a sidewalk.
I keep waiting for it to end.
The less I move them, the longer they seem to live. Tiny pockets of compressed surprise hidden among my taste buds. If I leave them alone, they continue their secret work, crackling in the darkness. It feels almost geological, like listening to ice shift inside a frozen lake.
I can hear them as much as feel them.
The sound seems impossibly loud.
My mouth becomes a cave full of echoes.
The candy drifts into my cheeks, settling in the jowls, and suddenly the popping grows louder there. Each tiny explosion ricochets through flesh and bone. The vibrations travel upward until it almost feels as though the sound is coming from my ears.
From somewhere inside my head.
Like a handful of pebbles tossed into a deep well.
Like distant applause from another room.
I stir them with my tongue and wake them again.
For a moment it feels as if my tongue has become a city at night viewed from above. Lights flickering on and off in random windows. Little bursts of life appearing and disappearing before I can focus on any one of them.
A faint crackle at the beginning of my throat.
A tiny explorer carrying fireworks into forbidden territory.
One crystal catches near a tonsil.
The feeling is so strange I almost laugh.
Like someone knocking once on a hidden door inside my neck.
I remember being a kid and believing all the stories.
Pop Rocks and soda would make your stomach explode.
Your head would launch into orbit.
Some cousin knew some kid who knew another kid who had practically detonated.
We believed everything back then.
The world still had room for impossible things.
I can almost see myself standing outside the corner store with scraped knees and dusty shoes, sunlight baking the sidewalk into that smell of hot concrete and old chewing gum. A quarter in one pocket. A packet of Pop Rocks in the other.
No medications lined up on a bathroom counter.
No awareness that time was even moving.
Just the certainty that tomorrow would take forever to arrive.
Back then the popping felt bigger.
Not because the candy was better.
Because everything was bigger.
A bicycle ride felt like crossing a continent.
A creek felt like an ocean.
Now I’m in my fifties, sitting here listening to candy explode in my mouth, and the sound carries something with it.
The pops become tiny time machines.
Each crackle opens a pinhole through decades.
For a moment I am here and there.
Gray hairs and scraped knees.
The packet grows emptier.
The fireworks become embers.
Stubborn little survivors.
Like memories that refuse to leave.
And when the last crystal finally gives up its tiny ghost, I sit there tasting the fading cherry and thinking how strange it is that something so small can contain so much time.
An entire childhood, still popping.
