Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury, is caramel apple pie. Electric-blue fills the night sky above shadows of horned beasts, for the carnival has rolled into town today. Gone are the endless summer days, deserted is the blazing sun on hopscotch chalk. Here the calliope plays, here the men are made of more than flesh, the women less than bones. A mirror maze formed with reflected time. A carousel shaped from repeated failures, around and around we go. Cling to youth and be forever old. Grow too fast and never change. Embrace this darkness, embrace this chill! Away from the music, nestled at the very edge of town is the tattered pie booth. Alone sits the wax man behind the counter. Alone are you, too. The night swells and grips your arms, teases your neck, sends whispers through your hair. Mummy-wrapped pies are stacked in boxes of crabapple red. You point, he nods. The hapless man with tattooed eyes cuts you a thick slice of caramel apple pie. Cinnamon-sugar sand falls through your fingers like forward-marching time. Caramel oozes down the sides, and there are faces in this goo, melting, drooping, stretching down. Apple chunks thump to the dirt, buried beneath ancient footprints. The buttery pastry flakes, greasing your palms. Raising the pie to licorice lips, one bite proves nothing more than a mouthful of dust. You try, again and again, around and around, spinning and eating and spinning again— but the entire slice has turned to dry sand. The man— no a boy!— behind the counter grins with an electric charge. As dust sprinkles from your mouth, you look down at your hands. Gone are the plump adolescent blisters— instead here are blotchy sunspots! Wrinkles, deep grooves. So shocked you are— the pie gives way, all dust, all sand, all time. Applause and hurray, for you were the final act! And the men and the women, the children, the wax dummies, the freaks, they laugh at the old man, once boy, who runs away. Covered in dust, in caramel apple pie.