The Boy Who Loved Chocolate
And a bit of cinnamon.
The Boy and the Chocolate Dream
Every morning before school, Oliver checked the pantry. Not for cereal or toast, but for the chocolate jar—an old glass thing with a brass lid and a faint crack down one side. His mother called it the "sugar trap" and tried to hide it, but Oliver always found it. Wrapped squares, smooth bars, tiny cocoa-dusted truffles—each a treasure, each a small miracle.
At age nine, Oliver had a dream—not of astronauts or baseball or treasure maps. He dreamed of owning a chocolate shop. A place where the shelves stretched to the ceiling, where fountains of warm fudge gurgled happily in the corners, and where a bell over the door rang not once, but twice, just for the joy of it.
School was dull. Math made him itch, and spelling tasted like chalk. But when he opened his lunchbox and saw a small square of dark chocolate nestled beside his sandwich, the world softened. The cafeteria’s plastic trays, the squeak of shoes, even the shriek of the lunch monitor—all faded as the chocolate melted slowly on his tongue.
“Do you ever think of anything else?” asked his best friend, June, one day on the swings.
“Not really,” Oliver admitted, swinging lazily. “I mean, chocolate’s everything.”
“That’s kind of sad,” she said, but she smiled when she said it.
One rainy Thursday, the school held a talent show. Kids did card tricks and cartwheels, sang off-key pop songs and played hesitant piano pieces. Oliver signed up, but wouldn’t say for what.
When it was his turn, he stepped onto the stage with a silver tray. On it sat twelve handmade truffles, arranged like a constellation. He wore a paper chef’s hat. His voice shook as he said, “These are my own. I call them Dream Bites.”
The first judge—a history teacher with a reputation for yawning—bit into one and sat up straight. The second judge—Mr. Morales from the cafeteria—closed his eyes and murmured something like a prayer. The third judge asked for a second.
Oliver won first place, but it wasn’t the ribbon he remembered. It was the line of kids afterward, waiting to ask him how he made them. He told them all the same thing: “Just love. And maybe a little cinnamon.”
That night, his mother tucked him in and said, “I guess it’s not just a sugar trap anymore.”
Oliver grinned in the dark. The dream was still far off, but for the first time, it didn’t feel like a fantasy. It felt like a recipe he just had to learn. One day, he’d hang a sign on his own shop, right above the bell that rang twice. And maybe, just maybe, he’d save one last Dream Bite for June.
