Deathly Addicted to You

The night my chocoholic husband confessed to cheating on me, he blamed it on my deathly allergy to chocolate and my lack of compassion for him despite his addiction. Suitcase in hand, he walked out the door, cutting my heart out like a slice of chocolate cake. Obsessed with revenge, I reached out to my best friend Marta, who could potentially talk me out of it, but mainly because she happened to be a witch.

The whole night I cried, texting Marta and leaving her voice messages to no avail. When she finally replied the next morning at 5 a.m., it was only to tell me to be ready in an hour. Once in her jeep, she apologized for not responding earlier, saying that I had needed to cry it out alone, while she stayed up consulting her cards and concocting a plan that would not involve murder but would instead benefit both Bruce and me.

“But he cheated! Why help him at all?”

“Giulia, of course he cheated; he’s a chocoholic!” Marta replied as she got onto the 91 West, leaving my hometown of Anaheim behind in the pinkish light of dawn.

“How is his addiction even relevant?”

“Well,” she said coolly. “Maybe he wants to eat chocolate off your naked body, and you, well, can’t really help with that.”

“You’re a troll!” I cried. ”My deathly allergy is not my fault.”

“Nor his. A relationship takes two, darling.”

I sipped my latte in silence.

“Look, you guys were doomed for a thousand-and-one reasons beyond his addiction and your allergy. Remember, his very white parents disowned him for marrying you, an adopted black girl from who-knows-where.”

“Ghana, that’s where.”

“It doesn’t matter. The point is, you guys already had pretty choppy shallow waters to wade through before things got deep.”

“How poetic,” I said sourly.

“Lucky for you, I got it all figured out.”

I sighed. For Marta, “all figured out” could mean something momentous like the discovery of penicillin, or something trivial to most people like realizing that “Go” is the shortest complete sentence in English.

“It's simple: you're addicted to chocolate.”

I nearly spilled my latte on myself. “What? But I am deathly allergic!”

“Unfortunate, true, and yet you married a chocoholic.”

“And?”

“Remember when you were five and your Polynesian nanny tried to exorcise a cacao demon out of you?”

“Yes.” I shuddered. Hina, the nanny-priestess, had tried feeding me five bars of Hu, the demon’s favorite chocolate brand from the Pacific Islands. The next step would have required drinking five gallons of water to wash out the demon, but I had already gone into anaphylactic shock, which ironically saved me from death by water intoxication.

“Well,” Marta continued. “I believe she was actually putting a cacao demon in you, unaware of your allergy.”

“But that’s—”

“Messed up, I know, but some demons are easier to train in human form.”

“And that makes me addicted to chocolate?”

“And to Bruce. A cacao demon craves chocolate, but, because of your allergy, the demon lives trapped in you, unable to fulfill its needs directly. So instead, he feeds on the closest thing to actual chocolate: a chocolate-infused aura.”

“Bruce’s!”

“Giulia, you are very very clever! Now to the first half of the plan, which involves bribing a tollbooth witch, seizing a spell, and making a chocolate cake with your bare hands. I don’t see what could go wrong.”

*****

Everything had almost gone wrong.

Forty minutes later, we were driving to the Korean Bell of Friendship in San Pedro, down South Gaffey Street and then up the hill leading to Angels Gate Park. Marta stopped suddenly at a pedestrian crossing and honked three times.

A tollbooth appeared out of nowhere, occupied by a short Latina that looked a lot like the lady selling oranges off the Euclid Street onramp to the 91 Freeway in Anaheim.

“One token opens the way. One token leads you through. One token gets you back.” The woman’s voice was all business.

“Look, Melchora,” Marta said. “I used all my tokens.”

“Shame,” Melchora said. “The cadejos will not let you pass.”

“Tell those dog-faced spirits I got something better: a cacao demon.”

Melchora pointed at me, frowning. “What if you can’t get it out of her?”

“The usual: one-hundred years of service.”

“And only worth one token. For the other two I’ll take her first female offspring.”

Marta snapped her fingers, silencing me before I could speak. “Deal!”

“Here,” Melchora said, giving Marta a large wooden hammer that she then dropped heavily in my lap. “Follow these steps,” she added, handing me a sticky note. “You have thirty minutes. I got oranges to sell.”

I read the instructions as we drove into a wall of fog that hadn’t been there before. Once parked, I followed Marta to the stone gazebo and stepped up to the giant bell, the world around us seemingly empty.

“Scream as you strike the bell and until you run out of air. Then keep your mouth open until the spell is safe inside you.” She snapped her fingers, restoring my voice.

I screamed as I raised the hammer and brought it down with all my force.

As you strike, picture the problem.

I saw Bruce devouring our love as he had devoured our wedding cake. The bell rang loudly.

After the strike, picture life before the problem.

I remembered Bruce when I first fell in love, before I really knew him. The bell’s voice became one with my scream.

As the ringing fades, picture yourself free of the problem.

I pictured him gone, a coffin lid closing on his dog face. I froze, but it was too late; the bell had stopped ringing.

The wind picked up furiously.

“Keep your mouth open,” Marta shouted.

A fist of air punched into my lungs, filling them painfully.

“Close your mouth, now!”

I closed my mouth and felt the spell within me.

“Now, you keep that mouth shut tight until it's time.”

The second half of the plan involved inviting Bruce over to my place to “talk things over” with me over a chocolate cake I myself would make as proof of my goodwill; Marta would mediate.

The cake looked scrumptious and, throughout the process, Marta only had to inject me with three of the four EpiPens she had brought. This left me with my ears pounding and a gripping headache as we waited for Bruce.

When he walked in at eight o’clock, he bore the proverbial tail between his legs. Dog, I thought, picturing him soiling the white carpet of my heart.

Marta led him to the sofa across from me, with only the coffee table between us.

“No need to be nervous, buddy,” Marta said, taking the chair closest to me. “Giulia here is very hurt but willing to hold her tongue until you explain everything.”

“So sorry, Giuly—baby.” His voice trembled. Then he went quiet.

Marta stood up. “Well, that’s a promising start. Why don’t we save the chat for later and first get Bruce a slice of chocolate cake?”

“What about Giulia?” Bruce asked, without looking at me.

“She ate something already.” Marta walked to the kitchen and came back to place the cake and a plate on the coffee table. She cut one thick slice. “You just keep your chocolatey paws off Giulia and we’ll all be fine.”

Bruce’s hands shook but he managed to eat through the slice with gusto. “It’s very good.”

Marta cut him another slice and pretty soon he was multitasking by chewing, apologizing, sobbing, sniffling, and some more apologizing. Chocolate painted his mouth brown until it looked like the rim of an unwashed toilet.

He had eaten half the cake when Marta stopped him. “Brucey, dear, I think it’s time for Giulia to release what’s in her chest.” She faced me. “Come on sweetie, let it out.”

Unsure of what I’d say, I stood up and opened my mouth. The words issued forth angrily and beyond my control.

“Bruce, you are nothing but a dog!”

There was a concussion to the air that shook the room, causing me to fall back into my chair and Bruce to drop his fork.

Only Marta seemed unaffected. “Was that it?”

But it wasn’t. Bruce shot up, grabbing at his throat, his face pale and bluish.

“He’s going into anaphylactic shock!” I shouted, meaning to get the remaining EpiPen, but instead I felt suddenly nauseated, throwing up brown-green vomit all over the remaining cake, the coffee table, and my expensive white rug.

Marta caught on and ran to the kitchen counter and back, uncapping the EpiPen and slamming it into Bruce’s thigh, but he just crumbled onto the floor.

“Shit,” Marta shouted. “This is not going to help him. You need to get him to a hospital now!”

“But you shot him.”

“He’s having a reaction to chocolate as a dog would. That’s what the spell did! What you did!”

With her help, we carried him down to my car, right into my passenger seat.

“What about you?” I asked.

“I must collect all your vomit and take it to the witch. It’s the demon.”

I would have vomited again except there was nothing left in my system.

*****

Bruce made it out of the hospital in a day, saying he would never eat chocolate again. Neither would I, even though my doctor had proclaimed me miraculously allergy-free. A few weeks later, Bruce grabbed the rest of his things and graciously signed the divorce papers.

One mystery remained: Marta, who had vanished without a trace.

Three months later, on my way to the doctor in Torrance, I was sitting at the light on Euclid Street, right before the 91 West onramp, where the orange lady's booth stood. My heart stopped when I saw that the woman was not the witch Melchora; it was Marta!

She saw me, signaling me to stay put as she made her way to the driver’s side, carrying a basket filled with oranges.

I rolled down the window. “Marta!”

“Giulia, you used to always come this way.” She was never good with greetings.

“Your phone was disconnected.”

“Yeah, the cadejos are not fond of technology.”

“The spirits?” I felt a chill. “But you delivered the demon.”

She leaned into the window. “Not in time.”

Cars were honking and going around me now that they had the green light.

“But you drive like the devil!”

“Exactly the problem. My brakes gave out before the crosswalk and I accidentally ran over the tollbooth witch.”

“Holy shit! Is she okay?”

“Nope. Died on the spot. And the contract required that I deliver the demon to her while alive.”

I blanched, remembering their deal and the part about my offspring.

“So, it’s a hundred years of service for me, doubling as an orange lady here and the tollbooth witch to Angels Gate Park.”

“Sorry,” is all I could say.

“Oh, it’s fine. At least I have the cacao demon, being trained as we speak.” She pointed at a young blonde girl now tending Marta’s booth. “And you?”

“Pretty good. The allergy is gone; so is Bruce, no longer an addict.”

“Great! So it wasn’t all for naught.”

“I guess.” I swallowed before asking, “What about the contract, the part about me?”

An uncomfortable silence lingered between us, the only sound the vibration of the freeway above us.

Suddenly, straightening up and taking a step back, she looked at me coldly and, for the first time, I saw her for the witch she truly was. “It’s simple: don’t have children.” And just like that, she was gone.

I jumped on the freeway. As the blur of buildings swept by, I touched my growing belly. Had the witch noticed? I wondered, feeling at once sad and guilty for having given away my child before it was even born.

I smiled hopefully, though, because the witch was only half right.

It might still be a boy.