Reese's Pieces

In the long wake of the Cup, the Pieces were born. They aspire to the ruffled crown, but their die has been cast: Pieces they were made, and Pieces they will remain. Cup and Pieces both were molded by the hand of H.B. Reese, who in 1928 draped the first chunk of peanut butter in Hershey Chocolate in his Pennsylvania basement. Why, with Cup in hand, he chose to fracture and reforge its peanut heart, we will never know. The results are as cruel as they are delicious.

To be a Reese's Piece is to be an island of meaning. The Pieces are estranged from grace, imperfect reflections of the Cup they aspire to be. Their bodies ensure their isolation. Candy shells, glossy and hard, both protect them and make unification impossible. Their shape, the oblate spheroid, cannot tesselate. Even if every coating was dissolved, their union would be a sad mockery of the Reese's Cup.

Paradoxically, Reese's Pieces exist in community. A single Piece is not just lonely, it is senseless, purposeless. Only in combination do their colors take on the feeling and ambition of their species. Only when gathered together do they earn their identity, alluding to the Cup. In what configuration do they come closest? From what angle do their hard-shelled bodies best resemble divinity? No matter how they try, no chimeric Frankenstein of Pieces can touch paradise. They are cut off from the divine current, bereft of chocolate glory, sentenced to smallness and isolation.

The curse of Reese's Pieces, as with us all, is to be derivative.

As part of their fragmentation, Reese's Pieces lost their chocolate coat and gained their shell. Their interior is different too: more crystalline, less creamy. This was a necessary adaptation.  Otherwise their oils would soften their shells, render them too vulnerable to survive, devolve them into a melty mess. Even as their shells preserve their integrity, those same shells ensure their solitude and loneliness. They are scarred survivors: to become hard on the outside, they had to become hard on the inside.

There is no chocolate here, but you can almost taste it. It is suggested from every angle. There is a visual resemblance to the M&M, a close cousin in texture though forged in the factories of a different brand. There is the name, which calls fond memories of chocolate to mind, prompting the conjuration of a cocoa coat (after all, we are best fooled by phantoms of our own invention). Finally, there is color: one fourth of the pieces themselves have brown skin. All this is a lie. When we eat the Pieces, we remember the cup they came from, almost taste it, even when the chocolate is absent. The Pieces cannot escape the specter of their god. They are constantly reminded of their shortcomings.

Despite their distance from the Cup, they have a flavor all their own. A freshly opened bag greets you with a toasty and bracing scent.  The Pieces feel small in your hand, hardly half the size of an M&M. The smooth shell, cool between your fingers, snaps as you bite through it. A burst of sweetness swells in your mouth. Shell fragments stick around, grinding down with every chew until they are unnoticeable. The smoky satisfaction of roast peanut is ephemeral, gone by the time you fully notice it. Instead, sugar dominates. It almost burns, a parching sediment that accumulates and inflames the roof of your mouth, swelling the back of your throat, leaving a needy heat in its wake. It is this heat that demands single pieces be chased by pairs, thruples, handfuls, the accelerating demolition of the bag a rapture in which all are found wanting.

Only in their destruction do the aspirants reach deific transcendence. Together again at last, their shells are shed as they are crushed into paste. All differences dissolve in a salivary baptism. Here is the final apotheosis of the Pieces, their angst resolved at last in a hungry maw. What they could not achieve in life, they come closest to in death.

Chocolate or no, by the time you swallow them, a few Pieces might as well be a Reese's.