The Green KitKat Inquest

Around 7:30pm Tuesday night, a strange package arrived at the hole-in-the-wall I call home. I had just gotten back from the hole-in-the-wall office, placating angry clients and finishing up some mountains of paperwork, so I was in no mood for any new mysteries. The package was from out East. Far East, that is. Looked like it was from one of my associates who was investigating a smuggling ring in Thailand. Sure enough, inside the wrapping was a letter from ol’ Joey Toxin. Toxin was a nickname for him. Had to do with his personality, I thought to myself.
Toxin’s letter said simply, “Here’s some treats from over here. Enjoy.” I didn’t like the sound of that, and wasn’t sure if I should try diffusing the box or just open it up. Toxin and I had a bit of a disagreement some weeks earlier over the transportation of cigars across international borders. Since then, I wasn’t sure what he had in store for me.
Inside there was a carved wooden fish, a couple of exotic-looking throat lozenges, and a weird KitKat bar.

Now, normally I’m a big fan of the sweet treats, and KitKats are some of my favourites. Lately, though, they’ve been making weird flavours, like KitKat Dark, or KitKat Coffee, or KitKat Trousersnake, or whatever. So while the packaging was strange, I wasn’t too surprised to see some kind of new, preternatural flavour of KitKat bar.
The packaging didn’t really give me any indication of the flavour, except some strange Asian script on the front of the package. It probably translated into something like “Don’t eat this — leave it for the tourists.” With the green wrapper, it probably tasted like something green … maybe lime, or possibly thai chili, or some kind of shallot flavour. Green mango maybe? God, I was hoping it wasn’t durian flavoured. I’d know soon enough — soon as I opened the package. Durian wasn’t exactly a fruit, so much as it was a biohazard. Imagine putting English custard, rotten onions and fiddler crabs into a blender and pressing ‘Liquefy’. Now imagine adding more rotten onions, and let it solidify in the sun for a few days. That’s what durian smelled and tasted like. No it wouldn’t be durian. Not even ol’ Toxin would do that to me. Not while I still owed him money.

I was really nervous when I opened up the wrapper and the bar was green as well. It wasn’t the same green as the wrapper. Not a fun, wacky, key lime green, but a sad, sulky green, like the green you’d find in a transcontinental air sickness bag. Luckily, no durian smell. No smell of any kind really. That made me nervous again. Nervous like a guy about to eat a piece of road-apple pie.

Weird. Outside of its wrapper, it looked like a regular KitKat bar. A little rounder on the edges, a little softer maybe … but that could have been the result of the shipping. This little ‘chocolate’ bar just spent a truckload of air miles coming here.
The only real thing I could do was to try it. I steeled up the nerve and took a bite.

Well, it wasn’t any of my guesses, and it sure as hell wasn’t durian. It was green tea. Not like the green tea you’d get in a bad restaurant down in Chinatown, but green tea mixed with the most saccharine sweetness ever. This wasn’t chocolate. It was chemical warfare in a candy wrapper. It was Horlicks mixed with Sweet’N Low, gunpowder, and lawn clippings.

I choked back the rest of the piece as tears welled up in my eyes. I then drank about a gallon of water to try to wash away the terrible taste. By this point, I was longing for the sweet taste of a spent cigar butt, hoping that it might make things better. I then eyed the wooden fish suspiciously. Wondered whether it would taste any worse than the KitKat.