Death Sugar

The attic is hot. The type of heat that makes you struggle to breathe. Dust hangs in the air like a hazy smoke. Underneath it, Jessica smells something sweet.
She finds it behind a box of her mother's old tax returns, past years of clutter. A plastic jack-o'-lantern bucket, faded orange, with the remains of a broken black handle. Her name runs across the side in thick black marker. JESSICA - HALLOWEEN 1997.
She was seven that year and barely remembers the night itself. She remembers nothing except the morning after. Her bucket was gone, candy vanished. Her mother stood at the kitchen sink, scrubbing dishes. She never mentioned where it went, and Jessica understood not to ask again.
Jessica tilts the bucket toward the light. It's still full.
Fun-size chocolate bars. Candy corn fills the bottom. Those hard taffy candies nobody makes anymore. She squeezes one of the chocolate bars. It's soft. As fresh as if purchased just yesterday.
That's impossible. Twenty-nine summers in an attic that bakes like an oven. It should be hard as a rock, fused to the wrappers. Stale, dead.
At the very bottom sits one piece, wrapped in folded notebook paper and twisted shut at both ends. There's writing on it. Jessica rotates it for a closer look, yet the lighting was too poor to read it.
"Mom?" Ellie calls from the foot of the ladder, her voice echoing up through the opening. "What are you doing up there?"
"Nothing, sweetie. Just going through Grandma's old junk."
"It smells like candy."
Jessica glances down at the bucket. "Just old junk up here," she says again, a little too quickly.
Ellie is nine. Throughout the week, she's been rummaging through every drawer and box in the house as though they held a secret exclusively for her. To her, Grandma's house is one big treasure chest, and Jessica gave up trying to keep her out of it days ago.
Jessica carries the bucket down the ladder and sets it on the dining room table. She means to come right back to it. Then her phone rings. The movers, calling about tomorrow's pickup. A minute turns into half an hour.
When she returns, the paper wrapped piece is lying beside the bucket. Untwisted. Small, curious fingers have smoothed the paper flat.
Jessica picks it up.
Her breath catches. The handwriting isn't her mother's. It's hers. The same slanted loops she uses on grocery lists. The same impatient slash across every t. Handwriting she knows she didn't have in 1997.
DON'T EAT IT. DO NOT LET HER EAT IT!
"Thanks for the candy, Mom!" Ellie calls, her mouth full.
Jessica looks up, horrified.