Chocolate

I always hated nap-time; that intensely boring time of the day, just after lunch, when Al and I were forced up into our room to sleep. It didn't matter to me whether I was tired or not—and generally I was, despite my vast stores of youthful energy. It was the principal of the thing! I had much more valuable things to devote my time to other than sleeping. But, no. I had to trudge upstairs, stay indoors, close my eyes, and waste thirty minutes of my young life on something as trivial as sleep. I looked forward to the time when I would be free to bound down the stairs and out the door almost as much as I dreaded that initial scaling of them. It got so bad sometimes that I would be unable to sleep and end up contemplating jumping out the window and on to the lawn, knowing even at my young age the damage that would be done to me.

But despite all that, I always stayed in our room, asleep or otherwise—Al and I both did, regardless of what we felt. We both knew that it would be easier for Mom if we did what she told us to, and neither of us wanted to make life harder for her. Dad had already made it hard enough anyway.

I suppose, though, that she eventually found out about our reservations concerning nap-time.

One day, when our time was served and we were headed back out into the world, Alphonse grabbed my sleeve just before we could open the door.

"Brother, look!"

Distracted and eager, I turned to yell at him, to tell him that whatever it was could wait until our rematch of the race I'd lost the day before, but I didn't get to say anything.

He was staring wide-eyed at a little table near the front door. There were two small, square anomalies on a napkin next to the light-blue vase. Now that we were stopped, I could see them clearly, and my mouth started to water even before I caught their rich, distinct scent.

Chocolate.

Being a small, rural village, we had immediate access to homegrown fruits, vegetables, grains, and meat, eggs, and milk that were taken from the animals raised by our farmers. Anything other than that had to be obtained either by going to a city, or by picking it up from a merchant who happened by the train station—neither of these happened too often. As such, chocolate was a rarity in Risembool. Before that day, the only other time we'd even had it in our house was my birthday two years prior.

Our hands snatched up the squares so quickly the vase nearly fell to the floor.

And from then on, as long as we were young enough to take naps, we would come across little squares of chocolate every few days. During the summer they'd be half-melted to the napkin and we'd have to lick off the delicious remains, never caring that we ended up eating bits of the paper; during the winter they'd be frozen, occasionally hurting our teeth and once taking out on of Al's. But they were sweet and smooth and delicious, and we always loved finding them, no matter their condition. So much so that we even began to look forward to nap-time, and would race each other upstairs, as though getting there faster would get us our reward faster.

We never mentioned them outright to Mom, and she never said anything about them to us. It became a kind of unspoken tradition between the three of us, carried out in secret, as though speaking about it would diminish its wonder.

I didn't know it then, but I know now that she didn't keep up the tradition for the sake of our sweet-tooths. She did it because she knew that, even without the promise of chocolate, we still would've wasted those thirty-minutes with a smile. Indeed, that was most surely why she started rewarding us in the first place—because she was able to recognize our naive displays of selflessness. She must've known that we did it because we loved her.

I believe she knew this right up until five years after Al and I stopped taking naps. Right up until the afternoon she died.