Prompt Images

Hershey

Your boyfriend doesn’t know that much about chocolate, but he grew up in Pennsylvania and the label reminded him of an innocence he lost long ago. The faint memory of the click-clack of the wooden roller coaster he rode with his father at Hersheypark 20 years ago filled him with nostalgia, and ultimately he allowed this nostalgia to overpower him. As the opioid receptors in his brain fired, he purchased you a candy bar and helped fund child slavery in West Africa.

Lindt

Your boyfriend has an appreciation for the finer things in life and likes to let you know it. He often chastises you for leaving his Criterion Blu-Rays un-alphabetized. He tells you that all your friends are “morons” who “wouldn’t know culture if it bit them on the ass,” but you know he’s just mad that they left his poetry reading early. In an effort to win you back, he made a big deal of buying “fine, imported” chocolate—you politely decided not to let him know that the truffles were manufactured in New Hampshire. At no point did he stop to consider that the twenty-eight American dollars he spent on thirty-one point seven ounces of chocolate (a real bargain!) would have been more expensive without the unpaid labor of 11 year-olds in Ghana.

Mars

Your boyfriend is a goofball, a real child at heart. His big smile and warm energy has endeared him to everyone to whom you’ve introduced him. He wears his baseball cap at a jaunty angle and chews bubble gum while drinking cheap beer at parties. He laughs with you about how his golden retriever tried to get into the chocolates and he had to wrestle her away from them. While he tackled his dog to the ground to protect her from harm, he didn’t think of the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire, not even for a moment. Why would he? He’s a good guy, he doesn’t support bad people.

A Depressing Listicle

Your boyfriend doesn’t eat chocolate, and sometimes loses track of the conversation when people talk about it. He sometimes pretends his primary objection to chocolate is based on some kind of moral high ground, when in fact he just doesn’t really care for the taste. When writing about chocolate, he makes repeated references to troubling economic factors surrounding the production of cocoa beans without really doing the research necessary to back up his premise. He is concerned with the flippant tone of his Valentine’s gift, but not enough to stop writing it or abandon his premise when he’s 400 words in. He finds the legislation surrounding Kinder eggs amusing.

Kinder Eggs

Your boyfriend is a badass rebel who doesn’t play by the rules. In between riding his motorcycle without a helmet and smoking unfiltered cigarettes, he enjoys rounds of pool and Charles Bronson films. He and his buddies sneak thousands of Kinder eggs across the Canadian border each year while listening to bootleg cassette tapes of their favorite KISS albums. He’s totally aware that the Ferrero corporation exploits child labor and he doesn’t give a fuck.

John Barnes

John Barnes has a B.S. in geography and recently severely burnt his thumb playing with fireworks in a storm drain in Northern Virginia.

learn more
Share this story
About The Prompt
A sweet, sweet collective of writers, artists, podcasters, and other creatives. Sound like fun?
Learn more