By Vicki Boguszewski
Key West
Published in Decimos #16
The thought of last night’s binges filled the morning like Boston Creme fills a Chocolate Eclair; there’s enough, for sure, but you want more anyway.
By 10:30, the requisite coffee-break, I was ready to take Donna-Ann’s brownies out of the break station and into a restroom stall.
I was choreographing the steps I’d need to perform to ditch the empty pan after the massacre, as I reached and picked up the nearly untouched pan from the ‘share’ table.
I was startled and mis-stepped my full routine as three of my C-Suite cohorts came into break station, talking about Donna-Ann’s brownies.
Damn things are famous!
I made like I was wiping my leftover crumbs from the table and put the pan back down within their reach with a satisfied smile. I returned to my desk without actually eating one brownie, for fear of looking like I had eaten two- standing there with the pan in my hand, wiping my crumbs from the table.
The night before I sat down with the cookie jar. The cookie jar was large and filled with soft baked chocolate chip cookies from the elderly lady next door; she baked for two or three times each week- a baklava to die for.
She had filled the jar, or one like it, every week, one or more times per week, for the last 12 years. For the last 6, I would empty them, the jars, in one sitting. In one sitting, I consume all of the cookies in the jar, as well as any large sized crumbs. I then fill the giant jar with milk, stir in my dark chocolate powder, and drink my chocolate milk from the cookie jar.
Though, judging from the growth in my person, this practice is not in my best interest, I maintain it with vigorous enthusiasm. Drinking my chocolate milk from the cookie jar brings me the deepest and greatest sense of sweet satisfaction; it matters not to me that I have grown three dress sizes or that more of my disposable income is spent on food I consume alone than on activities I engage in socially. No, these consequences are of no criterion matter when it comes to the pleasure of drinking my chocolate milk from the cookie jar.
On the days she bakes something other than cookies, or when I binge on self-provided indulgences, I drink from large mason jars sometimes filling two or more at a time with anything from cow’s milk to creamy sweet caffeinated concoctions, or sweet punches. Only with cookies do I drink my chocolate milk from the cookie jar; for only cookies provide the cookie jar.
When the she passes away, she is well over 85, I will buy a juicer and adopt a raw food lifestyle to repair my being.
In the meantime, I am prepared to go up three more sizes and know that someday I won’t care who sees me eat the brownies; I’ll take one and enjoy them thinking I ate two.
Until then, belly grumbling at my desk ’til lunchtime, I’ll indulge in my C-Suite fantasies and relive the mixing of my chocolate milk in the cookie jar. It’s blending is pure eroticism.
(*Mental note to self: request baklava this week.)