Bite Like Chocolate
Two sisters eat the forbidden chocolate. What happens next confirms their worst fears. New fiction by Bruna Barbosa
The McRoys were the first to be taken by the people in black. Next were the Huttings, who lived four houses down on the west side. Two days later, it was the Crownes—a family of seven.
All gone.
Despite the lingering fear keeping even us kids quiet, Papa called for a special day two weeks after the first Taking. That meant Momma got to bake her annual chocolate cake.
Papa and Momma never explained what made a day special, just like they didn’t tell us why we couldn’t eat chocolate. They promised we could have it only once we were married, as outlined in section two of our handbook.
With panic and fear sitting in our homes, stretching their limbs from corner to corner, I hoped Momma would let Leslie and I have some, that the threat surrounding us meant we could forget the commandments for once. I didn’t dare ask, though, for fear of jinxing it. Good things like chocolate cake had to be offered by Papa.
The sugary, earthy smell of Momma’s baked cake warmed the house from noon to late afternoon on Papa’s special day. After supper, Momma went to the fridge to collect her masterpiece. Hope bloomed in my chest like morning glories unfurling at the touch of sunlight. Momma returned with two desserts: the chocolate cake and the Sour Tower, a petite dessert made of rounds of sourdough bread with layers of crushed strawberries and peanut butter.
My morning glory of hope shriveled.
Papa commented on Momma’s generosity as Leslie split the Sour Tower in half, her cheeks bright and rosy.
“Thank you, Momma,” she said.
I poked at the tough, tangy dessert. The stringy red goop merged with the taupe butter, squeezing through the bread’s sides and air pockets. I couldn’t help but watch my parents eat their cake. They turned to one another, caging their actions like the sight was a sin. Momma wrapped her lips around her fork reverently, more so than when she took upon the body of Christ at church. Papa ate his piece fast. His cheeks stretched wide as he chewed. The bulb in his throat, evidence of Adam’s sin, bobbed as he swallowed each bite.
When I put the bread-butter-fruit in my mouth, it was what it always was: sticky, sour, sere.
I waited until everyone was asleep that night before following the hallway lights to the kitchen. In the fridge—there, the cake. Half-eaten by Momma and Papa. Last time, it had only lasted two days; Momma was awfully mean on the third day.
My fingers itched to dip into the frosting, to pull back some of the sugar and bring it to my mouth. The punishment loomed in my mind, bamboo whispering in the air before a resounding, solid whack.
I went for the water instead. As the icy liquid erased the memories of that sticky peanut butter, I pulled Momma’s recipe book closer to me, left open on the page of the chocolate cake. The list of ingredients (butter, milk, eggs, flour) seemed harmless. I often had butter and eggs on bread, downed by milk. The result was comforting but bland, a taste I no longer noticed. Could cacao and sugar be potent enough that, combined with other ingredients, the result was so delicious it turned sinful?
Quietly, I grabbed a fork drying by the sink and kneeled in front of the open fridge. The light cascaded down upon me like it did at the altars at church.
“What are you doing, Polly?” said a hushed voice that caught my hand in midair.
I turned to my sister, icy fear entering my skin.
“I was thirsty.”
“You can be allergic, you know,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Like bees?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “You could break out in hives. Swell up. Momma would have to take you to Charlie again, and everyone would know.”
Charlie’s dark eyes and sharp tools made me have nightmares.
I looked back at the cake. “That sounds silly.”
Leslie came closer, grabbed the fork from me, and said, “It happened to Mary Beth.”
Mary Beth. Now gone with her family, too.
My sister reached inside the fridge with a single finger. She poked the cake and pulled it back with a delicate swoop of brown frosting. Grabbing my wrist, she smoothed the sugar across it.
“If you have a reaction, we’ll know in a few minutes,” she said.
She sat beside me, letting the fridge light bathe us. The smell of the stew we had for dinner wafted out like onions peeled against the sun.
How old had my sister been when she snuck her first taste? Did she wait for Momma to bake the cake every year, celebrating it secretly?
Instead, I asked, “Do you know why they’re taking us? Or where?”
Her mouth scrunched. People said we looked alike, but my hair was curlier.
“I don’t,” she said, “but others are saying it’s someone within our community, someone they think really wears black instead of our white. Some are saying that it’s because of the telephones. That if you press the right numbers, they’ll come for you.”
The fridge behind us hummed, emptying the cold within and giving it to my hollow insides.
Leslie grabbed my arm and smeared the frosting away. It felt coarse and not as soft as I had first thought.
“Looks like you’re fine,” she said.
When she cut the cake, she produced a slice so thin a bit of the knife’s silver showed beneath the brown. My palms cupped in front of it, ready to accept it like communion bread.
It was too delicate to eat with my thick fingers, so I bowed my head to my hand and pressed my tongue against the crumbly velvet.
The taste flooded my mouth all at once, enveloping my senses in its richness. The sweetness sparked up my brain. I felt alert, awake. It didn’t taste like Sour Tower. I took my time chewing like Momma had done. There were notes of earthiness and berries, of cream and sugar. Chocolate was soft, and warmth settled in my stomach like it did when other kids laughed at my jokes.
I finished it within seconds.
Leslie washed away the evidence of our sin.
My sister was soon taken. It was a different sort of taken. She became a woman.
For a week, she wasn’t allowed to go to school. When she was, she had to go to a class, braid tucked under a white cap, with all the other new women to learn about marriage.
Yet, Leslie didn’t seem interested in all the chocolate cakes she would have soon. A sadness visited her that left the skin under her eyes looking deep and dark.
It made me scared of becoming a woman. Momma said it would happen one day. It was natural, like how the sun rose and set. No one could stop it, but Leslie tried.
A month after the chocolate cake, I went to her when I found blood staining the white of my underwear. Her wide eyes stared at me, projecting that haunting within.
“You’re only nine,” she said.
I wondered if it was a result of eating that sliver of cake. She’d warned me not to tell anyone about it, but I had told God. I’d told him it was only a breath of a sin and that it’d happened only once, so he shouldn’t worry about it.
“Give it a few months,” Leslie said, her fingers unsteady as she handed me a sanitary pad. “It might go away.”
I was uncomfortable lying, but Leslie helped me hide that sin, too.
They took us a week later in the dead of night.
In the front yard, Momma sunk to her knees and prayed, the begging and desperate kind we were taught never to do. Leslie clutched me to her, keeping me from going to Papa when the people in black slipped metal bracelets around his wrists. They pushed him inside a car that lit up with bright, red lights. Leslie didn’t cry. Not even when they pulled Momma from her prayers, screaming and calling them sinners as they gave her bracelets, too.
The people in black had a third car for Leslie and me. In the vehicle, my sister slipped her arm over my shoulder, turning her dry face away as if it was my reaction that she couldn’t stand to look at.
The gray building stood among other squared structures. They took us past doors, rows of chairs, more people in black, and then to a quiet room, darker in its gray and cooler than the outside air.
One woman in black remained, sitting behind a desk.
She asked a question I couldn’t hear over the rush in my ears. My throat felt scratchy and stretched above my aching lungs.
I realized Leslie was staring at me, that they both were.
“What?” I asked.
“I asked if you’re okay if I speak to your sister alone,” the woman said.
I grabbed Leslie’s arm, shaking my head. More tears blurred my vision.
“Okay,” the woman said, putting her hands up like Papa had done when he’d seen them. “That’s fine. We’ll wait until Soshel gets here.”
I wondered if Soshel was their leader.
My eyelids stuck together with salt; my jaw tightened. Leslie said words, soft words that didn’t take shape.
The woman picked up a bowl from the corner of her desk.
“Where’s Momma and Papa?” I asked, trying to be brave. It was a croak of a frog in the dead of night.
“You’ll see your mother soon,” the woman said. “Have something to eat.”
She pushed the bowl towards us. Inside was an assortment of shiny, bright squares emitting a sweet, familiar smell that pinched my nose.
“It’s okay,” Leslie said, patting my hand. “You can have chocolate now.”
I shied away. Momma used to say that her punishments were nothing compared to what God could do. She had been right.
Yet the woman stared at me, an eyebrow raised. “Take one,” she said.
Leslie’s hand went into the bowl, producing a reflective black square, and then she held it to me. I took it, the foil cold and smooth.
“Ah, not that one, kiddo,” the woman said. “That one is strong.”
She peeked into the bowl, her brown eyebrows climbing on her forehead, her long fingers rummaging through the colorful wrappers. She didn’t seem so scary then.
“How about…,” she said, “a peanut butter one?”
I shrunk back, clutching the one I had.
My sister stuffed one in her mouth as I ripped the foil to reveal a dark square. It didn’t look like Momma’s chocolate. It was shiny, with a raised print of a bird, wings outstretched. I stroked it with my thumb and brought it to my nose.
It smelled severe, profound, aged.
The door behind us opened, and I flinched at the man in black standing there.
“Officer Jenkins,” he said and nodded past his shoulder. “Soshel services is here.”
The woman stood and left us.
When Leslie reached into the bowl again, the sleeve of her sweater crawled up her arm. Around her wrist was a bruise, a cuff of purple and red. She popped the chocolate into her mouth. The whole square. It crunched beneath her teeth.
Curious, I turned to the one she’d given me. My teeth sunk into it with a crack. How strange that chocolate could be tough, that it could snap. The bitter, soil-like, dense notes coated my tongue.
It tasted like what Leslie looked under those white lights: fearless, confident, and the bitterness overpowering the sweet tones.
“Leslie?” I asked.
“Hm?” She reached for her third piece.
The chocolate coated my tongue with a stubborn sharpness as I tried to remember the word the people in black said in the car.
“What’s ‘cult’?”
Bruna M. Barbosa is a Latina fiction writer who draws inspiration from her multi-cultural experiences and is ever curious about the 'why' in each person (and character). Her work has been shortlisted by the Bellingham Review. Currently, she writes from her book-filled office in North Carolina, where her dog, Shakespeare, keeps her company at her feet.
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