i am a chocolate hero
by Swapan Samanta
Chapter 1: Dream or Reality
The power had been out for three hours.
In Dubai, where air conditioners hummed like digital lullabies, silence in the heat was suffocating. Raj lay in bed, sweat pooling beneath his spine. At first, it was the buzzing he noticed—the wings of something near his ear.
Flies.
They circled lazily, then urgently, around his face and body. One landed on his forehead. He couldn’t move to brush it away. Another crawled into his ear canal. His fingers didn’t twitch. Panic bloomed in his chest, but his body refused to obey.
Then came the cockroach—its antennae flicking across his clavicle, then down toward his sternum. More insects. Dozens. Beetles, moths, things he couldn’t identify. They poured from crevices he didn’t know existed.
He blinked.
A cockroach wasn’t crawling onto his arm. It was emerging from within his skin.
He tried to scream. Nothing. He tried to move. His limbs remained still. He wasn’t in bed anymore.
He was inside something cold. Metallic. Confined.
A refrigerator.
When he moved his neck, it creaked. Not bone against sinew—but something brittle. Cracked chocolate. He looked at his forearm. The skin wasn’t flesh. It peeled easily, revealing dark brown substance beneath.
He touched it. Soft. Smooth. Slightly melted.
Chocolate ice cream.
He peeled more. Creamy layers broke apart with his touch. It smelled sweet, expensive. When he brought a piece to his lips, it melted on his tongue. Belgian. Premium.
His blood wasn’t blood. It was thick, syrupy fudge.
He had become what she wanted.
A life-sized chocolate sculpture.
His torso collapsed like a poorly refrigerated dessert. Chocolate oozed in rich ribbons along the refrigerator walls. His head—somehow intact—watched it all happen. Watched his body melt.
And the insects kept feeding.
Through the thickening brown puddles, cockroaches swam and drowned. Beetles twitched, legs upturned in sweet death. The stink of sugar rotting in heat filled his nose.
Then came footsteps. A door creaked open. Bright fluorescent light flooded in.
Her silhouette framed the scene.
She didn’t scream. Didn’t cry. Priya’s mouth twisted, but not in grief.
In fury.
"STOP!" she shrieked, stepping forward, face contorted in disbelief. "What are you doing to yourself? You're ruining the proportions!"
Raj tried to speak. His lips were too melted. She batted his hand away with surgical urgency.
"Six months of work! Gone!" she gasped, examining the damage. "The definition—the muscle tone—it's collapsing!"
She scooped a palmful of melting chocolate and tasted it.
Then she froze.
Her face twisted in horror. "No, no, no! This tastes wrong! Cheap! Artificial! What did you do? Did your body metabolize it differently?"
She turned to him, voice sharp and clinical. "You've interfered with the blend. The chemistry's corrupted. You're spoiled."
She backed away, hyperventilating.
"I have to call someone. I need someone to fix this."
Her scream pierced the apartment.
"SOMEBODY HELP ME! MY HUSBAND IS MELTING!"
Her voice echoed through the flat, brittle and insane.
But she wasn’t afraid for Raj.
She was afraid for her ruined masterpiece.
Chapter 2: The Sketchbook and the Sculptor
Six months earlier, Priya and Raj had been living the Dubai dream.
He worked in IT consulting. She was a marketing executive at a luxury hotel chain. They lived in a sleek apartment overlooking the Burj Khalifa. On weekends, they posted latte art and skyline selfies. Their parents in Mumbai basked in secondhand pride.
But behind the Instagram filters, something else festered.
Raj first noticed it during a quiet breakfast. Priya had been sketching intently. When he asked what she was drawing, she turned the sketchpad slightly—just enough to reveal what looked like a male torso, intricately shaded.
It was unmistakably his. But peeled.
The drawing was flayed, exposing muscle lines, subcutaneous layers, skeletal contours. She had drawn temperature zones, cooling gradients, even annotations for structural integrity.
"You've been watching a lot of anatomy videos," he joked nervously.
She didn't smile. "Chocolate needs structure. If the mold collapses, everything fails."
Raj chuckled. She did not.
That night, he woke to find her crouched beside the bed, shining her phone flashlight over his chest, tracing the outline of his ribs with her finger.
"Just checking your geometry," she whispered.
He laughed, but didn’t sleep again.
Soon after, Priya began bringing home chocolate figurines—little six-inch people, sculpted with insane detail. Male, female, all meticulously shaped. Their eyes glistened with candy glaze. Their clothes were textured with edible threads.
She arranged them on the dining table like a military parade.
"See this one?" she held up a dark chocolate male. "He’s almost you. Perfect proportions. Defined, but not showy."
Raj stared. The chocolate figure had his jawline. His shoulders. Even the faint scar above his eyebrow.
"This isn't normal," he murmured.
"Normal is a marketing illusion," she replied. "Perfection is edible."
She started timing his meals. Weighing them. Adjusting his protein intake.
"Too much fat will affect texture," she said.
Raj stopped asking questions.
Once, he found her on a Zoom call with a Belgian chocolatier, discussing stabilizers and fat content.
Another time, she showed him a miniature mold of his face in silicone.
"You made this?"
She smiled. "Phase One."
That weekend, he came home to find the apartment full of industrial equipment: mixers, freezers, and stainless-steel tables.
"It’s for my catering side hustle," she said, brushing past him. "You support women entrepreneurs, don’t you?"
At night, she whispered to him while he slept:
"Soon you’ll be permanent. No more rot. No more disappointment. Just... sweetness."
He tried to laugh.
But even his laugh sounded afraid.
Chapter 3: Tasting Notes
Raj had never been a paranoid man. But in the final weeks, his nerves had become frayed threads, raw and twitching. The apartment—once a bright, air-conditioned haven—felt more like a lab. No, a test kitchen.
One morning, he opened the fridge and found labeled syringes next to the eggs. One read "Stabilizer A." Another: "Fat Modulator."
"Are you using chemicals in our food now?" he asked.
Priya didn't look up from her laptop. "Food-grade. Nothing toxic. You won't notice."
He laughed uneasily. "Notice what?"
She blinked at him. "How you're changing."
That night, he faked sleep while she whispered into her phone camera, recording herself.
"Entry log: Day 143. Subject remains intact. Texture at 98%. External consistency unchanged. Minor bloating due to environmental humidity. Internal chemistry stable. Phase Two imminent."
She ended the recording and stared at him.
"Do you know how lucky you are? Most men just rot."
Raj began making plans to leave. Book a ticket to Mumbai. But when he brought it up, she kissed his temple and said, "You're not ripe yet."
The day of the transformation, Priya prepared his favorite meal: butter chicken, basmati rice, naan.
"No chocolate today?" he asked.
"Not tonight," she said softly. "Tonight is for memory."
He ate quickly, hungry. He didn’t notice the bitterness in the curry. He didn’t notice the aftertaste, like ground aspirin. By the time he did, his limbs had gone heavy.
His tongue went dry.
His fingers wouldn’t move.
His head tilted to the side, helpless.
He saw her move through the kitchen with purpose. She laid out instruments on a stainless-steel tray, the way she always had for baking: carefully, efficiently, without waste.
"Don’t worry," she whispered. "You're going to be perfect."
Raj’s eyes tried to follow her. They fluttered.
She injected something into his neck. His world became gelatinous.
Before he blacked out completely, he heard her speaking, not to him, but to the camera again:
"Extraction begins. Phase Three activated."
Then darkness. Cold. Stillness.
But he did not die.
Chapter 4: The Sculptor's Process
The light above the kitchen table was harsh, clinical—LED with a cold blue hue. Priya worked in silence, her latex gloves powdering her wrists. Her breath was steady. Her focus, absolute.
Every tool was where it should be: scalpel, rib spreader, sterilized bone saw, retractors, forceps. She moved with the precision of a plastic surgeon, but her work was darker, more intimate.
The human body was so badly engineered, she thought. Skin tore inconsistently. Fat smeared. Bones resisted. But Raj’s frame had always been a model of symmetry.
"Start from the chest," she muttered, not for any audience but herself. "Preserve the rib cage. Protect the facial structure. Skin folds should be removed in contiguous layers."
She slit along his sternum, peeled gently with gloved fingers. When resistance came, she sprayed cooling mist to keep tissues firm. The process was slow, but she was methodical. Art required patience.
His eyes were open, pupils tracking her. The paralytic cocktail hadn’t dulled his awareness—only his ability to move or scream.
"Still lucid. That’s good. I need you aware. Conscious matter preserves better when it knows what it is."
She removed his skin like one would lift fondant from a cake, easing it free without tearing. At each stage, she documented with her phone.
"Phase Four complete. External casing intact."
She treated the flesh not like body but medium: washed it, dried it, stitched seams where necessary, and mounted it on a thermally resistant dummy frame. She would refill it later.
The organs were another matter. She dissolved them carefully, batch by batch, in industrial acid purchased discreetly from a lab supplier in Sharjah. What could not be dissolved was ground to paste and disposed in vacuum-sealed garbage bags.
"Disposal rate: efficient," she whispered, smiling.
But the face—ah, the face. That she left untouched. Raj's face was what had caught her attention the first day. The proportions. The bone symmetry. The eyes that glistened like tempered glass.
She kissed his frozen lips once—not with affection, but with reverence.
"You were raw material," she said. "Now you'll be art."
She moved to the mixer.
Dark Belgian chocolate. Premium base. Proprietary stabilizers. Chilled but not frozen. She had run tests for months to perfect it. Flavor integrity, melt resistance, texture pliancy.
She poured the blend into vats, alternated dark and milk chocolate for layer depth, piped it into molds section by section, filling his skin like a balloon—first the limbs, then the abdomen, then the spine.
She hummed while she worked.
"Layer complete," she noted. "Viscosity consistent. Final sealing in twelve hours."
By morning, the mold was whole. Raj was reborn—not a man, but a dessert. A man-shaped shell filled with premium ice cream, layered, sculpted, and sealed within his own skin.
She opened the industrial freezer door and slid him in.
"Now you're ready."
She closed the door and clicked the lock. The temperature was precisely calibrated.
She wiped her gloves and updated her journal.
"Phase Five complete. Next: Controlled tasting."
Then she closed the book.
And slept.
Chapter 5: The Melting Point
The storm arrived without warning. A desert squall, thick with sand and fury, descended upon Dubai in waves. The wind howled down boulevards, coated every car in grit, and blotted out the skyline.
At exactly 2:11 AM, the power died.
Priya woke to the silence.
The air conditioning had stopped. The glow of the freezer's digital control panel was gone.
She shot out of bed.
In the kitchen, the silence was terminal. The backup generator—small, insufficient, decorative more than functional—hadn't kicked in.
She unlocked the freezer and opened it.
A puff of warm air wafted out. She felt it before she saw it.
The temperature had already climbed four degrees.
"No," she whispered. "No, no, no."
She slapped the control panel. Dead. She turned to the wall switch. Flipped it. Nothing. Grabbed her phone.
No signal. No power. No cooling.
Inside the freezer, the chocolate began to sweat.
By 3:00 AM, the first layer collapsed. His abdomen caved inward. Condensation pooled on his thighs. The arm she had so lovingly filled with a chocolate swirl mixture slipped from its seam.
Raj remained conscious.
Whether it was the preservative mix, some freak effect of the chemicals, or something deeper, Priya never knew. But the man—what was left of him—was still there.
His eyes followed her as she knelt, analyzing the damage.
"You’re liquefying," she said flatly. "Too soon."
He blinked once, slowly.
"I did everything right," she hissed. "I calibrated. I tested. You were stable."
She dipped her fingers into the chocolate pooling beneath his torso. Tasted it.
Her expression curdled.
"No. No! This isn’t the formula! This is… bitter. Sloppy. Your body's interfering—your internal chemistry is destabilizing the matrix. You're ruining the blend from the inside out."
He tried to speak, but no sound came. His lips had softened into a sludge.
She grabbed a spoon. Scooped from his chest. Tasted.
Spat.
"Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable."
Her voice broke, but not from sorrow. From technical outrage.
She paced. Grabbed a notebook. Made marks.
"Four degrees shift equals fifteen percent melt. Ten percent texture loss. Mouthfeel: ruined. Viscosity: ruined. You were supposed to last for years."
She turned to him slowly, accusingly.
"I trusted you to stay intact."
Her hands trembled as she backed away from the collapsing form.
Chocolate flooded from the freezer and began creeping across the tile floor. Priya didn’t step around it. She stepped through it, bare feet dragging brown streaks.
The storm outside screamed.
Inside, she reached for her phone again.
Dialed emergency services.
"Police? Yes, I need to report a crime. My husband has been destroyed because of your power failure."
There was a pause on the line.
"Ma’am—"
"I spent six months building him! Premium Belgian chocolate! Stabilizers! Structural architecture! And now it’s gone. All of it. Gone. He’s melted!"
"Ma’am… did you say… he’s made of chocolate?"
"Don’t act stupid. I demand compensation. I demand legal action against DEWA, against the building management, against whoever let this happen. This was deliberate sabotage."
She screamed the last words as she dropped the phone and fell to her knees.
Her hands were covered in chocolate.
The kind that used to have a name.
Chapter 6: The Evidence Locker
The police arrived twenty minutes after Priya's call.
Two officers, both young, stood at the door as she flung it open. The look on her face was not panic. It was outrage.
"Come in! Quickly! You need to witness the damage while the texture is still recognizable!"
They followed her into the kitchen. The smell hit them first: overpoweringly sweet, cloying, nauseating. The second thing they noticed was the floor—sticky and slick with dark brown puddles.
Then they saw the source.
The industrial freezer was wide open, its interior flooded with partially melted chocolate. Amid the brown slush floated what appeared to be a human head, serene and eerily preserved.
One officer gagged.
Priya ignored them both. She grabbed a small plate and began scooping a sample.
"Here. Taste this. You have to understand the violation. This was meant to be soft, creamy, complex. It’s now grainy. The mouthfeel is ruined."
The officer shook his head. "Ma’am, we’re not going to—"
"TASTE IT!" she screamed, shoving the plate toward him. "This was my life's work. My legacy. Do you know how many trials it took to perfect the blend? The shaping? The stability?"
"Ma’am, whose head is that?"
She paused. Blinked.
"My husband's, of course. Why else would I have preserved it so carefully?"
The officers exchanged looks.
"So... you killed him?"
"Don’t be ridiculous. I converted him."
They started backing toward the door.
"You’re not listening! You need to seize the power company’s assets! Freeze the grid operators! They’re the real murderers here!"
"Ma’am, we’re going to need you to come with us."
They moved to restrain her. She didn’t resist. She simply turned, stepped back through the puddle of chocolate, and muttered, "At least collect samples before it fully spoils."
Chapter 7: The Journal and the Tutorial
The investigation moved quickly. The apartment was sealed. Forensics gathered what they could.
What they found was more than a crime scene. It was a lab. A shrine. A cookbook of horror.
On Priya’s laptop were hundreds of files: schematics of Raj’s anatomy annotated for molding. Simulations of freezer thermodynamics. Search history littered with terms like “food-safe embalming” and “confectionary dermal fillers.”
Her phone contained a video diary, painstakingly edited. She had documented the process: drugging, skinning, filling, sealing, freezing. Step by step.
Voiceover in the video: “You want the shell to be seamless. Human skin, properly treated, holds chocolate far better than silicone.”
In her journal, one page read:
PHASE PLAN:
Acquire model
Strip organic matter
Replace internal volume with chocolate matrix
Preserve face for visual continuity
Taste test
Repeat with enhancements
Another entry: “He loved butter chicken. The irony is poetic.”
And finally, the last note: “Tomorrow, tasting begins. My perfect chocolate hero is ready. I will start with his hands. Perhaps the fingers first.”
Chapter 8: The Interview Room
They sat her down in a small gray room with one-way glass, a humming vent, and two plastic chairs. Priya sat with her back straight, hands folded neatly in her lap, as if waiting for a conference call.
Across from her, Detective Amina Farouk flipped through a folder thick with printouts.
"Do you know why you're here?" Amina asked.
"Because your infrastructure failed," Priya said. "And I demand compensation."
"Your husband is dead."
"No," she said plainly. "He's not. He's preserved. Or at least he was preserved, until your city let him melt."
Amina placed a photo on the table: Raj’s face, suspended in the chocolate muck.
Priya looked at it for a long moment.
"The eyes held beautifully," she murmured. "I wasn’t sure they would."
Amina slid another photo forward—one of the journal’s phase plan.
"You planned this. You documented it. You killed him."
Priya tilted her head.
"Would you accuse a baker of killing flour?"
Amina stared. "You skinned your husband. You dissolved his organs. You filled his body with dessert."
"That’s reductive," Priya said. "I refined him."
"Why?"
"Because he loved me."
Amina leaned in. "And that justified turning him into a confection?"
"Love is temporary," Priya said calmly. "Art is forever."
There was silence.
"Do you feel remorse?"
Priya considered this. "I feel disappointed. Not in myself. In the melt. In the execution. The flavors didn’t integrate as I expected. But that’s part of the process."
Amina nodded slowly. "You know, the courts will find you insane."
"I’m not insane," Priya said.
"Then what are you?"
She smiled, serene and quiet.
"I’m a visionary who ran out of time."
Amina pushed her chair back. She had heard enough.
As the door closed behind her, Priya whispered to the empty room, "I just needed one more day in the cold."
Chapter 9: The Final Scoop
Months later, the case was a media sensation. The tabloids called it "The Chocolate Wife Horror." News anchors delivered updates with a mix of fascination and disgust. Armchair psychologists argued online over whether Priya was a murderer, an artist, or simply insane.
The preserved head of Raj had been sealed in evidence storage, kept at controlled temperature in a government facility. No one dared dispose of it. Forensics teams said it remained oddly stable—eyes open, serene. A confection with a soul.
But one night, during a shift change, the camera in Evidence Locker 7 went offline for seven minutes.
When power returned, the head was gone.
No signs of forced entry. No traces left behind. Just an empty refrigerated case, a faint scent of cocoa, and something smeared on the inside of the glass:
A single fingerprint. Sticky. Human.
And in a quiet, tucked-away café in the industrial zone, a dessert appeared on the secret menu.
The chef—nameless, always in a cap—offered it to special patrons only.
"Raj au Chocolat," he called it.
When asked what was in it, the chef would smile and say:
"Perfection. Preserved."
Photo of Swapan Samanta
BIO: Dr. Swapan Samanta is a Kolkata-based physician and multi-genre writer whose work merges clinical precision with surreal, mythic horror. He has written over four hundred books across fiction, philosophy, mythology, and experimental literature. His work has been accepted by Leadstart Publishing and Motilal Banarsidass. He explores the dark intersections of ritual, psychology, and transformation.