A Candle Cove Anecdote

Loved this show. Horace Horrible was my favorite. I remember looking everywhere for his action figure but Kiddie City and KB had never even heard of the line. I finally found a talking Horace, good as new, at somebody’s yard sale, though I didn’t see a house around and never saw those people again. I was pretty excited, and ran right to my friend’s house to gloat.

When his mom answered the door, she let out the most guttural scream I’d ever heard, absolutely scaring the shit out of me. She told me to get lost with “that thing” and slammed the door in my face. My kid-logic concluded that she must have known I bought a toy from a stranger completely unsupervised, and that it must have been an even more serious crime than I thought.

So, I did my best to keep Horace hidden, especially from my own parents, but his voice chip was pretty damn loud, and every so often he’d go off by himself, like his battery was dying. My mom kept asking if Marble (our cat) was in my room…I don’t know how you mistake that goofy chuckling for a cat.

It was subtle at first, but after a few days he started to smell weird. His voice kept getting weaker and more garbled, and his joints kept getting looser like they were ready to drop off. I was afraid of getting caught and we didn’t have trash pickup, so I did what a rational child does when he thinks he has contraband and buried it in the woods.

I never found another one or figured out what was wrong with him, but it’s the weirdest thing; a tree grew where I left him, I shit you not, in just a couple weeks. It never grew leaves and it never got much taller than me, but it’s there to this day, and every summer it swarms with disturbing numbers of flies.