“Charlie Bucket, you are the rightful heir to the Wonka’s Chocolates, is that correct?”
Charlie resisted the urge to say something rash. The only reason he’d allowed himself to be dragged into court at all was out of respect for Willy Wonka’s reputation. It’d been years since he’d taken over Wonka’s confectionary empire. The days when little Charlie Bucket used to nibble on bits of birthday chocolate were far behind him. Gone too were any signs of timidity or sweetness. Charlie Bucket had grown into a hardnosed billionaire, numbed by a lifestyle of excess spiked with bitter rivalries.
“Who is it now?” Charlie wondered. “Slugworth’s kid? Prodnose’s progeny? That impossible Fickelgruber back from the dead?”
Charlie had nightmares about his day in court ever since the summons arrived tucked inside the flamboyant wrapper of a Whipple-Scrumptious Fudge Delight. That particular bar had always been his favorite. When he unwrapped the surprise bar of chocolate, he found a summons written in pure legalese, printed on golden paper.
Charlie was represented by an old acquaintance of his: Mike Teevee. Mike was tall, thin, and could’ve been a star on any professional basketball team if he wasn’t also a sadistic psychopath.
Charlie had seen Mike’s case in the newspaper one morning as he sipped his morning cup of hot cocoa and, due to a brief wave of nostalgia, had sent an Oompa Loompa with a briefcase full of cash to get Mike’s gun charges dropped.
Afterward, Mike had put himself through law school and volunteered to act as Charlie’s defense if the day should ever come. Charlie had no need for Mike’s night-school law degree. He had a whole army of Oompa Loompas who formed his legal team. But this case was different. The case was brought up by an Oompa Loompa, and no Oompa Loompa would ever go against another. It was part of their tribal code, and so Mike Teevee, whose attorney-at-law hotline TV commercial featured him “shooting” the competition with a toy gun, was hired to much chagrin.
“We’ll kill the sons of bitches,” Mike hissed at Charlie before they entered the courtroom.
Charlie had woken up that morning with a sense of foreboding, but after seeing his tall, gangly lawyer, he knew he was doomed.
“Prosecutor, enough with the theatrics. Call your witness,” the judge said grumpily.
“Certainly, Your Honor. I understand that time is precious, and I shan’t waste any more of it,” the prosecutor said sniggeringly. “I would like to call to the stand Mrs. Willy Wonka.”
*
The tabloids went mad. Newspapers flew off the shelves even faster than the day the Golden Tickets were announced.
“Wonka had a mistress!”
“He was a little too friendly with the help, if you know what I mean!”
“He liked them young!”
“He liked them small!”
“He liked them orange, green, and purple!”
Mrs. Wonka, or so she claimed herself to be, was in fact, not purple. She wasn’t orange, but she did have green hair. Whether or not she loved chocolate was the only thing not in question, for the metal detector rang to such hysteria that her bag had to be searched. Her Birken was found to be filled with chocolate balls wrapped in colorful foils.
Her skin was brown, and she was small, and her hair was straightened from its natural curls.
All in all, she had the look of someone who was once beautiful and had grown to be somehow statuesque despite her punitive size. It was no wonder that Mr. Monka had taken notice of her, if her claims were true.
But what could she prove? What could she claim, other than a fleeting romance that may or may not have happened, just before Mr. Wonka flew up in the Great Glass Elevator to outer space?
Then, following that adventure, in a book that was never published, embarking on a time-traveling excursion from which he’d never returned?
That was the last the world had ever heard of Willy Wonka, the mighty chocolatier and ingenious capitalist. And now, here was this well-dressed Oompa Loompa claiming to have loved him, and to have been loved by him.
The defense snorted with disbelief. Pure slander. Salacity!
“We’ll sue for defamation to Willy Wonka’s good name,” Mike Teevee murmured to Charlie.
Charlie wasn’t so easily convinced.
The Oompa Loompa had the audacity to claim to have been Wonka’s bride, even going so far as to say that Mr. Wonka had told her himself—with an original tune played on his flute—this detail created absolute chaos in the courtroom—that she should never want for anything, that all that was his would be hers.
Was this pillow talk, or an exchange of ownership?
“Don’t worry, Charlie,” Mike Teevee said as he sweated bullets. “Unless she can produce the son of a bitch, she’s got nothing but talk.”
It turned out that Mike Teevee had spoken too soon, for who should enter the courtroom but a young boy, about the same age as Charlie was when Mr. Wonka had made all little Charlie’s dreams come true?
The lad had his mother’s statue, but the face was pure Wonka.
It only took the tabloids a day before euphemisms were printed in huge bold-face headlines. An endless variety of double-entendres, suggesting that the boy was filled with Wonka’s strawberry-flavored blood, or created out of Wonka’s magical custard.
The judge quickly grew tired of this and demanded that, within his courts anyway, Mr. Wonka’s bodily fluids stop being compared to edible sweets.
Respectfully. Respectfully.
*
The trial had become an absolute circus. Mrs. Wonka, breaking down in tears on the stand, pointed her finger at Charlie.
She howled that he had had her removed from the factory grounds once he learned of her pregnancy.
“I was banished,” she cried, “once Charlie learned who the father was!”
“Wasn’t this also because Wonka’s Chocolates had no maternity leave program to speak of?” the Oompa Loompa’s lawyer was quick to add, fueling the flames of injustice.
“Yes, that too!” the Oompa Loompa woman cried. “They threw me out on the street with my little cocoa bean growing in my belly. He was afraid that Willy Wonka loved me more than him!”
“Those are lies!” Charlie fired back, losing his self-control. “She refused to wear a hairnet and wouldn’t fall in line. Her kinky hair was getting into all the chocolate!”
It was quickly reported thusly.
“BUCKET DEMANDS WOMEN ‘GET IN LINE.’”
“BUCKET SAYS NO TO ‘KINKY’ HAIR.”
The press murdered him.
Charlie Bucket is a racist. Charlie Bucket is a misogynist.
Even his most sympathetic supporters, true devotees of the Wonka brand, couldn’t help but wonder why couldn’t he have just said her “hair” got into the chocolate? Why did it have to be called “kinky”?
Wasn’t hair in chocolate problematic—period? Why should it matter what kind of hair it was?
The tabloids began referring to Charlie Bucket as “Charlie Bigot” and featured front page splashes of him in unflattering, red-faced, gesticulating poses.
The worst moment was yet to come. The prosecution soon asked whether Charlie had ever noticed any proclivities of Mr. Wonka’s during the time that was spent with him in the factory, or in outer space as they traveled in that glass elevator.
“What are you getting at?” Charlie seethed, his blood near a boil.
“You spent a lot of time together,” the Oompa Loompa’s lawyer said. “So much love and attention was lavished upon you. One would suspect that your relationship extended beyond that of a master and an apprentice.”
“You bastard,” Charlie growled.
“Objection!” Mike Teevee called out, though for what reason, was unclear.
The lawyer gave Mike a confused look.
“Sustained,” the judge said, nodding at them both.
“Mr. Bucket, it’s a well-known fact that you are a bachelor,” the Oompa Loompa’s lawyer continued, changing tact slightly. “You must know from first-hand experience how lonely it can be working and living in the factory. Willy Wonka knew his share of loneliness too, didn’t he?”
Charlie’s face softened a little, remembering that eccentric and kooky man who he loved almost as much as he loved his own father. The man who gave him everything.
“Willy was a genius. He’d never done anything wrong in my eyes. He was my friend, and I loved him,” Charlie testified to a hushed courtroom. Everyone held their breath for a moment as Charlie clarified. “But I was just a little boy then. If he had any relationship with an Oompa Loompa, I didn’t know about it because he was decent enough not to tell me.”
This answer seemed to satisfy the jury, though Mike was completely soaked from head to toe as if he’d stepped out of the shower. Did Charlie just admit that it was possible that Mrs. Wonka was in fact that little boy’s mother?
“Now wait a second!” Mike Teevee called out in a flash of reason. “If Willy Wonka did impregnate that Oompa-Loompa when Charlie was a little boy, wouldn’t the supposed heir be nearly as old as Charlie?”
“It’s a proven fact that Oompa Loompas grow much slower than normal humans,” the Oompa Loompa’s lawyer stated. “To think otherwise is bigotry!”
This obscure factoid gave the jury pause, but it didn’t matter anymore. If that boy’s blood came back half-Oompa Loompa and half-Wonka, the defense was skizzered.
The trial continued without rest. Mrs. Wonka seemed determined to humiliate Charlie as some sort of revenge. Charlie could see it on that Oompa-Loompish bitch’s face.
“I’d like to draw the courtroom’s attention to Exhibit A,” the Oompa Loompa’s lawyer announced. “Feast your eyes on how lonely a man can become when secluded and shackled to his work.”
Charlie’s face fell in shame as the judge, the jury, and the nation turned their attention to a huge mound of chocolate, shaped in the form of a voluptuous woman. The chocolate statue lay on its back, its chocolate nipples clearly nibbled at more than once, the mouth in the shape of an “O”.
The statue looked almost surprised that it was made of chocolate. Worse still was the amount of detail in the depiction of its…anatomical parts. The broken pelvis particularly, a mishap caused by chocolate melt due to an excess of friction.
“He’s sick!”
“He’s perverted!”
“He’s disgusting!”
“He’s a deviant!”
“He’s debauched!”
“He’s corrupted!”
Charlie soon left the court, absolved from his position as CEO at Wonka’s Chocolates. The little boy who was proven to indeed be half-Wonka began to do a dance, and all the Oompa-Loompas in the courtroom joined in.
It was pandemonium.
What hurt Charlie the most was that after all the years of love and care he had shown to his workers, they wanted nothing but to be rid of him and have one of their own as the rightful owner of the factory.
Charlie went inside of his Great Glass Elevator 3000, a new version he’d had created for himself since Wonka himself was still probably flying around milking giant prehistoric flowers for some rare nectar or something equally improbable.
Charlie pushed a button which he’d been saving for all his life, just in case.
For Charlie was well past 40, a single white male with no god to believe in nor a family to hold him back from doing what needed doing.
Charlie pressed a red button that simply said “Gun”.
From the top of the elevator dropped an automatic rifle loaded with a magazine full of golden bullets.
Then, with a strange sense of clarity, Charlie whistled a little tune to himself as he exited the elevator and walked toward the factory gates.