The next morning, her refrigerator was filled with seventy-two identical chocolate bars. She didn't remember making them. But when she bit into one, she heard the celeste again. And somewhere in the distance, a broken paddle kept stirring.

Everyone who listened to it started craving something they couldn't name. Not chocolate exactly—something denser. More melancholy. A longing for a childhood birthday party that never happened, or the last bite of a candy bar you dropped in the mud. The music was sweet, but it left a bitter aftertaste in your dreams.

But the album was cursed.

The final track, "Rivers of Rondonia," was seven minutes of a single, out-of-tune celeste playing over the sound of a river of molten chocolate being stirred by a broken paddle. It was said that if you played it backward, you’d hear the ghost of a chocolatier whispering the recipe for the world’s most perfect, most addictive, most dangerous bonbon—one that would make you forget every sad thing, but also forget how to stop eating.

The Chocolate Factory Album was no longer an album. It had finally become what it always wanted to be: a factory that needed a worker.

The rain hadn’t stopped in a week, which was a problem for a place like the Chocolate Factory Album . It wasn’t a factory that made albums—it was an album that was a factory.

She licked it.