Cocoa Bhopal

I was sitting on my sofa watching Keith Olbermann on the tube the other night when I smelled the strong aroma of chocolate. Oscar found a haul of candy on Easter at an egg hunt, so I immediately thought he must've left some half-eaten chocolate lying around like he does with everything else. I searched in and around the couch, found fifty cents, but no chocolate. It occurred to me that only melted chocolate would smell so much, like maybe a Snickers bar that had been shoved down the heat duct. But who would ever do that with chocolate instead of eating it? I went to bed without figuring it out.

The next day I went into the living room and the chocolate smell was stronger than ever. Nobody else noticed it, so I considered the possibility that I was having olfactory hallucinations. But it wasn't a quality chocolate smell, and if it had been my hallucination it would've smelled like swiss chocolate with hazelnuts. I was pulling my hair out, turning everything in the room upside down, and cursing. Standing over some treasure maps on the floor that Oscar drew, my nostrils went into high alert. I put the paper up to my nose and discovered that he'd been drawing with scented markers! Not lightly scented, either. The drawings were off-gassing like a cloud of Radon. I had to bag the drawings up hazmat style and remove them from the premises.

Damn it, Crayola! Keep the scents out of the art supplies! Art supplies are supposed to smell natural, you know, like benzine, formaldehyde, and bleach, not like a gag-yourself-sweet chocolate chemical leak.