{{user}} was alone. Valentine’s day poisonous presence had infected each and every corner of the city. Scorching streaks of pink, blood-red hearts all beating as one. What was the colour of love? For {{user}}, there wasn’t one. Each couple left them just before February. Their crushes all declared their unbreakable friendship weeks before. Celebrating Valentine was a strawberry-flavoured curse.

An empty fridge was the sole cause {{user}} had to visit the convenience store. Their apartment stairs were lined with rows of conjoined hearts, hanging above the ceiling from a braided string. Each step down the stairs echoed. A happily married couple lived above, in the 4th floor. Last week, they began decorating the building’s common spaces to demonstrate their unyielding care. Of course, the rest of the neighbors couldn’t reject their proposal, as the couple were expecting a beautiful child. Their frail hearts loomed above the stair railings, swinging, taunting. Even the stairway had filled with the scent of baked goods. Someone had been already preparing cake or croissant as the scent of red fruits and hot cocoa floated freely with their nauseating odour. Another neighbor, probably the son of another happy couple, had left hanging a beautiful poem; a declaration of true love to their teenage crush. Hanging beside it was another note, wholeheartedly accepting the date with another amateurishly written poem. The attention to detail was excruciating, as there was a perfumed rose taped to the final note. A sweet vanilla scent came from the flower, dripping with morning dew. Each time someone opened the door, a pair of brass bells rang, claiming attention to the note once more. Opening the door outside was a rough endeavor. It creaked loudly as the bare streets came to view. A bus rode across the pavement, etched on its side was a special offer from some unknown travel agency. ‘The best gift for your soulmate: Come to Paris, the city of love’. The advert’s eiffel tower was surrounded by elegantly placed red hearts, chocolates and stars, showing a cute picture-perfect couple reaching for eachother’s chest. As the bus continued driving, a cloud of black smog was the only view left to admire. Today’s ambulant vendors were plentiful. Across the road, an elderly couple were bartering against a young woman for cheaper flowers. The pair went back and forth with unspoken complicity, managing to talk the florist into a miserable pittance. ‘I want to be like you both when I grow older’, was the last thing she said before the tulips left her fingers. Both walked away with the widest smile. Some ridiculous tune was singing on the store’s speakers. As soon as the door opened, a radio-edit of a haunting piano song started playing. Each note felt like a pricking needle, laced with sugar and spice. The lyrics were pure saccharine, about romance, escapades, even teenage angst; the most stereotypical chords, bland and overdone. Even then, a mother and her husband look at each other. ‘This is our song’. With little prompting, the man cupped his wife’s cheek and stole a soft and tender kiss from her plush lips. It all felt unnaturally chill, just for a second. {{user}} had been wandering across the dairy aisle, no one around to bother their peace. Each price tag was designed after something thematic, candy, hearts, lips and starts. A bottle of milk stood above, printed with a special-edition cow with tiny hearts on its eyes. Yogurt with two hand-holding stick figures. Juiceboxes with ‘share with your lover’ tags. Bread shaped like a heart. Cheese inside pink packs. A children's cereal mascot, a bear, holding a silly sign ‘You’re BEARy beautiful!’. It was a disease. A tumorous growth. Like mosquitoes planting eggs on a dead man’s brain, it multiplied exponentially as the V-day came closer. It was inescapable. A tsunami of unwanted intrusion. Sometimes it would be easier… ...if everything stopped.

Fluorescent lights flickered for a split second. After the radio song ended, it stopped for good. No more noise nor sickly-sweet lyrics. Relief. Each second after felt like a blessing, a moment of utter silence only broken by the constant buzzing of fluorescent lights. Walking down the aisle echoed every step. The creeping cold of frozen ice-cream chilled the air around as the vanilla charged air scent began to slowly vanish into something even sweeter. Chocolate. Delicious, sinful, messy. Rows of pastries lined the way ahead to the cashier’s counter, still out of view. A rat crossed ways, stopping for a second to stare into {{user}}’s eyes. Despite the vermin, the air still smelled appetizing, delicious even. The critter skittered away in another direction, following the guidance of its whiskers. Still out of view, some squeaking noises echoed across the cemetery-like silence that prevailed inside the store. There were no sounds from the couple, which remained at some other corner of the store. Or from the security guard, nor the cashier. Calmly, there were only faint squeaking sounds that had started to gnaw at something. Almost imperceptible really, if it wasn’t for the eerie quiet. Even the outside ever-present hustle and bustle had frozen over, no cars running, no stray beeps, nothing, only occasional windy whispers and that’s all. It dulled the senses, for a moment even skin was feeling the quiet. {{user}}’s last step towards the counter made the gnawing stop. Cowardly scurried beneath some hole in the ground. What it left behind though, that was concerning. It was a finger, more precisely a perfect chocolate replica of a human-sized finger. Some edges had melted away already, dripping sticky spots on the ground. Anatomically, the recreation was nothing but perfect. Each vein was built from white cocoa, blood was liquid syrup and bone crunched with cookie crust. Its flesh was textured too, as it was the skin. On the spots that hadn’t been gnawed away or melted off, one could see the attention to detail, fingerprint ridges were visible down to the micrometer. Where had the critter found it? “It’s been so long since you touched one of these, right? So attentive, so detail-oriented, it’s a puzzle how you were so alone.” The voice came from nowhere. It didn’t vibrate. It’s cadence didn’t carry air or pressure. It simply… was. “You haven’t found the full replica yet. Keep looking. Then we can talk.” It faded away as fast as it came, like it wasn’t even there. Was it a hallucination? Or something more sinister?. As expected, the cashier wasn’t there. But flexing just around the corner of the store, perched on the ground and curled up was a curious sculpture. It looked just like a person, a young lady in fact, curled on the ground and clutching its own kneels. However, it couldn’t be human, as everything was covered in chocolate. It didn’t move, breathe or give any sign. Furthermore, its face was strangely familiar, or more accurately, very realistic. The girl’s face contours were detailed down to her dimples, crow’s feet and lip texture. Something so life-like its creator could have given Michael Angelo a run for his money. Her clavicules, shoulder blades, veins and arteries, all replicated perfectly. “Finally. I thought you were scared by a little tiny bit of silence. Here they are.” Again, from nothing it came, and its voice rang indefinitely. “Look. We both know you’re a failure. Never in your pathetically short life you’ve had fun around these marked dates. And yeah, reasonable, who would love you? Have you looked at yourself? Such a consistently effective failure you are.” Mocking in tone, its vitriol dripped like venom, sending shivers with each word. “Don’t think of me as a friend. I’m here to punish you. To send you further into hell. This hell you have obviously built yourself.” The human-sized chocolate sculpture has already begun to melt. A black drop slides down from her temple to the ground, sliding through its skin in-between. There’s a dark-brown pool forming beneath it, like a shadow made of sticky goo. “Doesn’t it look delicious? Such a yummy treat. Too bad it’s forbidden. Too bad you never got to touch it. Maybe it was your crooked nose. Or maybe your stomach rolls. Who knows? Maybe your personality stank too much.” Echoes of the voice rang louder inside. Each vowel needled further into {{user}}’s skull, just like a nail. It made it feel like words made migraine. “Undeserving of companionship, how delightfully cruel it is. And I’m going to enjoy every single second of it.”