The scent of chocolate was in the air. How it reached my nostrils through the candy wrappers, I’ll never understand. The shabby convenience store was dimly lit, the yellow fluorescent light irritating my eyes. The floor was dirty, the clerk behind the counter dirtier.
I couldn’t resist the temptation, despite this ratty interior. The candy bars were kept sealed, wrapped tight in cellophane wrappers. I picked out five, of varying flavors and amounts of peanut butter and caramel. My mouth salivated.
I approached the counter, the clerk moving from his seat to stand ready at the register. He had a smug look on his face. I could read what his eyes were saying: The last thing this chick needs is a candy bar. I grinned back, baring the few teeth I have left in my head at him. He looked away, repulsed by the blackened stubs dangling from my gums. I grinned wider.
I paid with cash and refused the receipt. I didn’t want to leave a paper trail. The last thing I needed was to get busted eating candy bars. My mother would hunt me down and shoot me dead for disobeying her rules. The stupid bitch.
I clambered into my car, arranging my bulk behind the wheel. I didn’t care if it was a tight squeeze. I had my chocolate and I was happy now, or at least, that’s what I kept telling myself.
I drove to a nearby park, not daring to unwrap the candy in the car. With my heightened senses towards chocolate, I could smell it through the wrapper, but my mother couldn’t. If I unwrapped it in the car though–oh boy, she would know I was eating it then.
I heaved myself out of the car, working up a sweat, soiling my purple dress. It was loose and flowing around me, allowing air under it’s cotton material to dry out the sweat in my fat rolls. I felt cool and comfortable whenever I wore it. It would have to be washed again tonight.
I sighed, taking my candy to a nearby bench. A smelly trash can lingered near to it, the smell making bile rise in my throat. I could live with that though. The candy would fight the bile down and I couldn’t move to another bench. This was the only bench close to a trash can and I just didn’t have the energy to walk from bench to trash can then to car. I planned these secret candy-eating trips carefully, and never made more than one in the same location within a month. I always picked new places.
But this spot was definitely my favorite above them all. I could watch the young kids and their parents running around the park, reminiscing about my own childhood. My mother had never had time to do that kind of stuff with me. I had to stay home and keep the house locked tight. She was a single mother. My father left her when she told him she was pregnant. She never seemed to really love me, just tolerating me until I reached the age when I could leave the house.
I never did though. As time went by and my only friends were the friendly television cartoon people and puppets who filled my days while my mother was at work, I grew fatter and weaker. I never went out to play, mother always saying if something happened to me she’d never forgive me. I stayed inside, rotting away slowly on the couch. My mind wasn’t as weak as my body. I turned to Jeopardy and other similar trivia shows in the days as I grew older. During the school year I would fill the evening hours with studying and homework. I was a top student in my class, although by the last year of school I couldn’t fit into the desks anymore and I had to sit in a chair at a table specially put there for me.
Being a top student wasn’t worth the humiliation I went through every day at school….
I shooed the thoughts away. I didn’t want to think about the agony of high school. I wanted to watch the kids and their moms and dads frolic in the field, parents chasing the kids down the slides, pushing them on swings. My heart ached as I stuffed a chocolate covered peanut butter cup in my mouth.
I ate the candy bars slowly and the sun sank into the horizon. The children and parents had left the park, and I was watching couples strolling through the trees. They held hands and kissed when they thought no one was watching.
But I was watching. I was always watching.
I dumped the wrappers in the trash can after licking them clean. It would be the last taste of chocolate I would get for another week, until my day came to spend the afternoon out. She tried to make me go out now, allowing me some freedom on Saturdays, her only days off. I think she really just couldn’t bear to be in the house with me all day long. I can’t blame her. I don’t think I could’ve stood being in the house with myself either.
I wobbled to the car and squeezed into the driver’s seat again. I drove home, flicking on the headlights when the sun no longer lit the streets. My mind keep reliving the taste of that choco–oh, shit. I forgot to brush my teeth.
I pulled off the road quickly into a store parking lot. I grabbed my purse and hurried inside. I ducked into the nearest bathroom and pulled out my mini toothbrush and tooth paste kit. I didn’t have many teeth left after all the rotting the sugar did to them. My mother didn’t think I deserved to have my teeth taken care of if I continued to put that dirty candy in my mouth. That wasn’t the point of brushing my wasted teeth, though. I wanted to get rid of the smell of chocolate in my mouth. She could smell the slightest whiff of it, not being a chocolate eater herself. I’ve been told it’s similar to a smoker who can’t smell the lingering scent of smoke in their clothing or hair; they’ve become too accustomed to it. But a non-smoker can smell it from a mile away. She was like that. She used to know whenever I’d been eating chocolate, but since I started this weekly routine, she hadn’t picked up on it. Yet.
A few other women in the bathroom ogled me while I brushed my teeth. I felt the remaining spirit I had left in me bristle at their stares. A part of me that I barely knew existed still admonished me for behaving the way I was, sneaking candy and brushing away the evidence like that. I quashed that voice and ignored it. The chocolate made me happy.
Turning towards the onlookers as I left, I opened my mouth wide for them to see. I waggled my tongue and growled at them. One girl shrieked and ducked her head into her mother’s dress. I only laughed. Driving away, I felt the ire bubbling in my chest. The chocolate didn’t help much this week. Usually it calmed the anger in me, but today it just fueled the fire.
I went home and my mother was waiting at the door. She was tapping her toes on the cement porch, eyeing the street for my return. The hallway light lit her up, sending her shadow sprawling across the lawn. It frightened me, seeing her standing there like that.
“Hello, Mama.” I said.
“Jenny, what are you doing?” she asked.
“Nothing, Mama. I just went for a walk around the mall. I saw a few books I’d like to get in the bookstore, if you would be okay with that.”
“You know you don’t get anything from me until you lose some weight. You damn well know that, Jenny. Don’t you try to talk soft to your mother. That gets you nowhere. Now you get in this house and get cleaned up for dinner.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied. Her words stoked the fire burning away inside of my heart. I wondered what color my heart was. Was it purple with abuse and neglect? Was it red and healthy? Or was it black with the rotting festering pus of my soul?
I didn’t know and I didn’t care. All I kept thinking, again and again, was Mama’s never had a taste of chocolate. Perhaps it’s time she did.
I walked into the house. She’d laid the table with meat loaf and vegetables. Green beans and broccoli. Didn’t anyone teach this woman about making the plate colorful? That the more colorful the foods on the plate the healthier it was? Mama always made green vegetables. I think she was just fond of the color green.
She sat down at the table before me and was bowing her head in prayer. She never asked me to pray along side her, nor did she ever pray aloud. I knew what she was praying for. She was asking God to make me better or to knock me dead. Either way, she just wanted me out of her life.
I walked past her, stepping into the kitchen. I heard her mumble, “Amen,” and then the scrape of her fork on her plate. I picked up the heavy wooden rolling pin from the kitchen counter. Walking back to the dining room, I stopped behind her chair. She craned her neck back and looked at me. I raised my hand high in the air as she started to speak. “What are you doing, Jen–”
I brought the rolling pin down hard on her temple. Her head snapped back and rebounded against the pin, hitting it again. The crack echoed through the house. It seemed as loud as cannon fire. I hurried to the window as her body slumped to the floor. No neighbors were running over. I heard no screams of alarm.
I ran back to the body and felt for her pulse. It was still there, weak but throbbing under my fingertips. I lifted her body up, panting before I even carried her to the hallway. I managed to make it to the car in one trip. I suppose I was running completely on adrenaline, my heart was racing madly. I thought I would have a heart attack from the exertion.
I didn’t. I dumped her body in the trunk and once again, fitted my bulk behind the steering wheel. I drove out to the nearby Hershey factory. They opened one here recently. Supposedly the chocolate sales here were skyrocketing. I laughed when I heard that tidbit, thinking they moved here for me.
Suppose they did?
The factory wasn’t maximumly secured. There were no gates or security guards, which surprised me. Chocolate is a supreme commodity in today’s world. As it was, there was still the matter of getting in.
I weighed the odds, standing at the door with my mother’s body laying on the ground next to my feet. We were about twenty minutes outside of town. If I broke the door and an alarm went off, it would take approximately fifteen to twenty minutes for the police to arrive. The police were notoriously slow in this city, especially when it came to robberies. I’d listen to hundreds of townspeople complain on the news. They described the poor service they received after calling the police, talking about how the police always went to a bigger call because there wasn’t much they could do about a robbery.
If I hurried, I could make it in and out before the police arrived.
I picked up a rock nearby, it was as big as my forearm, and threw it through the window. The glass shattered, echoing through the silent night. My mother stirred on the ground a little, and then rested again.
“Twenty minutes,” I said to myself.
I reached through the broken glass, cutting my arm as I did, and unlocked the door. It opened into the business area.
When the factory first opened, they held a few tours of the inside and I, of course, had gone on one of my free Saturdays. They took us through this main office area and down a back hallway. The third door on the right opened into the catwalks over the main chocolate vats. A few vats were open, if I remembered correctly, to the catwalks for ingredients to be added. The metal vats had been dark colored, stained by the chocolate.
I picked up my mother’s limp body and ran–I was really booking for a three hundred pound twenty four year old–through the office area with its modernized cubicles, and through the back hallway. I opened the third door I saw to my right.
A few interior lights lit up the chocolate mixing room. It was amazing, seeing those huge vats filled with chocolate again. My heart skipped a beat and my stomach was full of butterflies. I felt so happy. And this time, my mother was here with me.
I carried her over the catwalk, careful to listen for the creaking of a rusty plank. I heard no such squeaking and felt relieved that my bulk would not break it. I stopped over a large mixing vat. It was half filled with chocolate and the surface rippled and flowed. I was lucky. The mixer was on. They’d mentioned at the tour that the mixers were left on overnight, shutting down completely only on holidays and for repair.
I stood there for just a second, my mother’s body starting to move in my arms. She opened her eyes and looked up at me. I smiled down at her, and bared my toothless grin. She tried to wiggle free, tried to beg me to let her go but her speech was impaired by the dent in her skull. She couldn’t speak properly, her words coming out in garbled English. I couldn’t tell what she was saying. But her eyes spoke. Her eyes screamed at me, begged me not to do what she was afraid I was going to.
She caught her breath and started to really scream. The sound snagged my ear drum, pinching my brain. I leaned forward and dropped her. She fell the fifteen feet to the vat, landing in a large splash of chocolate. I watched, grinning with black stubs, as she was dragged down by the current in the mixer. I watched her face, submerging in the chocolate and then popping up again, as she was pulled down into the mixer blades. I heard a loud pop, like a water balloon bursting and I saw her face no more. I did see a few body parts, a hand for a second, a foot still in its shoe.
I left quickly, hoping her body would be completely obliterated by the huge machine. I ran to the car, feeling my body drop a hundred pounds in that flight. My purple dress was completely soaked by sweat and it smelled of fear and exhilaration. I loved that feeling.
I raced towards home, but as I reached the outskirts I slowed down. I could see blue and red flashing lights cresting the hill ahead, and I turned off down a deserted country road.
I followed it for a few miles and turned north and made my way back to town.
I stopped at a convenience store along the way and bought a Hershey chocolate bar. The last I would likely be buying for a while.
The newspaper the next morning held an interesting story. The chocolate factory had been burglarized, but the police said nothing had been stolen nor any damage done. It was baffling. There were no clues. The fingerprints found at the scene did not match any currently on file. They asked the populace to call the anonymous tip number if anyone had any information.
A few days after that, the newspaper had a small article in it’s Local News section. It stated that a local resident had gone missing, and that her daughter was anxiously awaiting her return and any information relating to the woman’s disappearance would be greatly appreciated.
I smiled when I read the paper that morning. The journalist had been gracious enough not to include a photograph of myself, but she did post one of my mother.
In the end, I wasn’t able to resist the temptation any longer. I went back to the dirty convenience store and bought another Hershey bar. This time I took it home and ate it in the privacy of my living room.
I bit down into the chocolate, the flavoring rushing my mouth and the tiny grains of cocoa soothing my taste buds. Then I felt something long and stringy in my mouth. I pulled it out.
It was a dark blonde hair–the same shade as my mother’s. I laughed, the same shade as mine too. I probably just got some hair on my hands earlier.
I took another bite. I chomped down on something hard as a nail. The thought that I hadn’t bought an almond bar flitted across my mind. I pulled the hard object out.
It was a nail- a fingernail. A whole dark red polished fingernail. Like my mother’s.
Hmmm…. perhaps she did end up as a chocolate bar? I smiled again, my toothless grin scaring no one in this desolate home, and took another bite.
After all, chocolate is chocolate.
