Pamucklian for Chocolate

Chapter One

1 one T hree weeks before his sixteenth birthday, Josiah was allowed to move back in with his mother, who had been impregnated with him during an alien abduction her freshman year of college. Josiah did not move back into the home he had grown up in—the home he had lived in with his mother—but rather Josiah moved into the home of Johnson Davis, his mother’s new fianc é. Johnson Davis, with whom Josiah’s mother had been living for the past four and a half months, also had a child: a girl, seventeen, fully-human, named Bree, who also lived in the home of Johnson Davis, but only on the weekends.    When Josiah first saw Bree, he thought she was pretty. He thought her hair was shiny, and he liked the way she looked in her soccer uniform. When she looked at him for the first time, she smiled. He looked away.    Growing up, Josiah ate nothing but chocolate. He ate chocolate for breakfast, lunch, afternoon snacks, and, of course, he ate chocolate 2 • parnucklian for chocolate for dinner. Chocolate ice cream, chocolate brownies, chocolate donuts , chocolate candy bars and cake and mousse and pudding and his very favorite: chocolate cream pie. Josiah’s beverages consisted of chocolate milk, chocolate milkshakes , hot chocolate, and chocolate flavored drinks such as YooHoo . The only beverage, and for that matter, the only nourishment whatsoever, that Josiah ever ingested that had not been made with chocolate or covered with chocolate, had been the occasional glass of ice water. Josiah, however, was in perfectly good health. He had a relatively fast metabolism, and, more importantly, was not fully-human, thereby making him insusceptible to many of the nutritional laws that typically affect the human race. “Other children, Josiah,” Josiah’s mother would often say, from the time he was very young, “cannot eat all of the chocolate they want. If they did, they would get sick and they would get fat. But your body is different. Your body is part-Parnucklian, and Parnucklianseatnothingbutchocolate .Itistheironlyfood.Ofcourse,they do not call it chocolate, because they speak Parnucklian, and the word ‘chocolate’ is an Earthling word. They call it Boboli, which is Parnucklian for chocolate. “The planet Parnuckle,” Josiah’s mother would often continue, “which is the home planet of your father, and therefore is your home as well, will always be your home, even though you have never been there, and possibly never will, but it will always be there as your home, because it is the home of your father, just like this home, which is my home, and also your home, is also your home, even if you grow up and move far away, as long as you live, or unless I move to another home, but then that home will also be your home. Your father, on the other hand, will never leave Parnuckle, so that will not be an issue. Of course, that’s not quite fair, as it’s comparing a house on a planet to a planet. I, likewise, will never leave this planet, nor will this house, or any house I may be living in, either in the future or whenever.”    b.h. james • 3 As Johnson Davis, Josiah’s mother’s new fiancé, pulled into the driveway of his home, Josiah’s mother leaned over the front seat to address Josiah, who was sitting in the back, and said, “Josiah, this is Mr. Davis’s home. This is where we will be living from now on.” The home of Johnson Davis was larger than the home that Josiah and his mother had lived in. The home of Johnson Davis was blue and had two stories and unlike the home that Josiah had lived in with his mother, the home of Johnson Davis did not look exactly like the other houses on the same street. The home of Johnson Davis also had a large front lawn with green grass.    Once, when Josiah was around five years old, he had gone with his mother to the grocery store to shop for groceries. Josiah had often gone with his mother to the grocery store because Josiah’s mother was a single mother and could not leave him home alone at that age, and also because Josiah was very attached to his mother and loved her very much. While in the bread aisle, shopping for little Boboli donuts...