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Coconut Meringue Cake

1 fresh coconut

430 g caster sugar

120 g unsalted butter

500 g plain flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

250 ml whole milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

3 egg whites

Dash of rum

Frosting

200 g egg whites (6 – 7 eggs)

320 g caster sugar

¼ teaspoon vanilla extract

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Pierce the eyes of the coconut and strain the milk into a jug.

Add water to make 250 ml and pour into a saucepan.    

Add 60 g of sugar and bring to the boil, stirring frequently, then set aside to cool.

Digging her bare toes into the mossy ground and wishing for another world, eleven-year-old Rosa Flores de Miranda was so absorbed with the struggle of a solitary ant and the twig he carried on his back, that she did not hear the screams of the boy-bird hurtling towards her from the sky.

When Diego Soler landed at her feet, a mess of arms and wings, time held its breath for the young pair while the universe adjusted to the reverberations of their chance encounter.  A hummingbird dipped its beak past the petals of a bleeding heart, a cicada woke from a seven-year sleep, and the world spun again.  The cheeks of the boy were flushed, his chin grazed and his knees speckled with dirt and blood.  As he staggered to his feet he apologised awkwardly for the disturbance while cursing the girl for almost getting herself injured had he landed just an inch further to the left.  Rosa thought, with his red shorts and dark skin, that he looked rather like a robin and told him so.  The boy-bird was mildly offended, preferring his aviation to be attributed to that of an eagle or crow, but beamed back at her and offered his hand in greeting.  She squeezed it gently for fear of further damaging the crumpled wings of cardboard and coat hangers that were bound to his arms with old shirtsleeves.  As she opened her mouth to ask where he had come from, the hoarse bellow of her tyrant guardian was projected from the house and reached their ears with mutual fear, forcing her to let go and run from the boy-bird.  Just before she arrived at the door, she turned to wave to the strangest of visitors, but he was gone. 

In the care of her stepmother, a bitter widow who resented the world almost as much as Rosa, she lived a lonely childhood in the house on the cliffs.  Her father had built it just before he died but her stepmother had since sewn a hedge around the border that walled them in and cast a permanent shadow across the garden.  Rosa immersed herself in its leafy kingdom, where she played the role of a princess reigning over her miniature empire, awaiting her prince.  Each year that Rosa grew, so did the hedge, always just a few inches taller than she was and it was dense and thorny enough that she could not even see through to the world beyond or hear the sea below.  

Almost a year passed before she saw the boy-bird again.  Rosa was raking the soil around the cabbages when she heard a whistling sound from above, shortly before Diego landed in a heap, flattening the lettuces and obliterating the tomatoes.  The winged contraption that had delivered him was made this time from wicker coated with melted tyres, sealed with leather scraps and a bed sheet hooked across as a parachute.  He told her that he lived up in the mountains and was going to be a pilot one day so that he could see the world.  He wanted to soar above the skyscrapers of the cities, cross the seas to lands covered in sand and pray in the temples of the East.  When Rosa showed him the hedge and told him that she had never seen beyond that very cliff, he made a promise that he would build a proper plane that could fly them both and come back to rescue her.

Over the years that followed the boy-bird returned sporadically with improved models made from scraps and the scavenged remains of redundant machinery, but none that could carry them away together.  One early evening saw him descend on a glorified sheet of corrugated iron, while another had him fashion wings out of peacock feathers and a particularly hazy autumn morning welcomed a boy dressed in a suit of paper lampshades.  With unwavering determination, he repeated his promise to the girl each time, positive that he was on the cusp of his ultimate creation and convinced that time would be patient with them.  Together they would sit under the seclusion of the chestnut tree and he would tell her stories of the things he had seen on his adventures, the people that he had encountered and the inventions that crammed his mind, a web of ideas that would one day come to life.  Diego insisted that if Rosa could not go to the world, then it would come to her, and so each time he glided down from the heavens he came armed with parcels of trinkets, drawings and photos that together painted Rosa a picture of what lay beyond the cliff.

On her fifteenth birthday, her stepmother announced that she was going to a correctional institution for wayward girls.  Certainly the least wayward of children, Rosa accepted her fate with grace and did not allow her stepmother the satisfaction of her tears as she packed her suitcase.  If Rosa had thought her life to be hard up until then, nothing could have quite prepared her for the brutal, torturous exile that awaited her on the other side of the hedge.  As the wheels turned out of the gates, she felt a lifting in her heart as she drank in her surroundings and the outside world, but it fell down again and beat heavy in the pit of her stomach when she wondered how the boy-bird would ever find her again.

The institute was nothing more than a slave factory, demanding that the girls be up before dawn and assigned numbers - names were considered an indulgence - and tasks that would keep them occupied until late in the evening.  Aside from the general maintenance of washing, cooking, cleaning, and gardening, there was woodwork, needlework, metalwork, paperwork and rubber work, the fruits of which the nuns received a tidy sum for while the diligence of the girls went unrewarded.  Rosa took solace in her sleep and, each night, would find the boy-bird in her dreams.  When her stepmother had cut off her hair to sell, Diego had given her a beautiful gold clip engraved with roses, to encourage the hair to grow back again faster.  As she lay her head on the pillow, under the watch of the moon, she would hold the clip to her heart and guide her lucid thoughts towards Diego and into her dreams.  So vivid were they that at times she woke believing it was real, before the tears of realisation came and she forced herself to get through another day so that she could be with him again at nightfall.

Then one morning, a whisper rippled across the lips of the girls, growing into the hum of a drone of bees until it was drowned out by the whirr of an engine and Rosa’s heart skipped a beat.  She let the spade drop to the grass and turned to see Diego, handsome as ever and now a man-bird, twisting through the air with metal wings fashioned from a thousand tin cans and a wooden propeller that spun him down towards her.  A princess in a fairytale, her knight-bird in tin armour had come to rescue her.

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Heat the drained coconut in a warm oven for 15 minutes.

Crack open the coconut and scoop out the flesh from the shell.

Trim off the brown skin with a sharp knife.

Grate the coconut and set aside.

Diego had found Rosa at the institute from the directions she had given him in her dreams.  Despite their distance, their love had transcended time and when they closed their eyes at night they entered into each other’s minds.  Fate had torn them apart but out of their love they had created another world in which to share their lives and the chimerical adventures that existed in their hearts were as real as any day. 

The village above the clouds was spread across three mountain peaks connected by a network of bridges, swings and pulleys.  Its height was no hindrance, the microclimate was sub-tropical and vegetation was in abundance.  Diego’s inventions ensured that fresh water flowed throughout, heated by the sun and delivered to each hut through a series of pipes and gutters.  Crops sewed themselves, fields were self-harvesting and the trees chopped their own branches so there was never a shortage of firewood and the people, relieved of their daily toils, had time for other, more rewarding pursuits.  As the plane navigated the clouds, the people came out from their huts to wave and cheer as their prince and princess came to land.

Despite the initial rage of Diego’s father after learning that his son had fuelled the piston engine of his plane with his special homebrew, the family welcomed Rosa in as one of their own. His mother was an enormous woman with the largest of hearts, who could lose you in her bosom and reduce you to tears with her laugh.  His brothers were all younger versions of Diego and Rosa saw a little of the robin, the sparrow and the seagull in all of them.  The whole village, who were rather adept at celebrations, joined in the festivities and delighted in meeting the girl that Diego had told them he was going to marry after their very first encounter.  A marathon of eating, drinking and dancing went on well after the curtains of day had opened with the cockerel’s crow and the village collapsed onto their cloud-beds and allowed the day to drift past.

Rita Daza de Delfin baked their wedding cake.  It was a seven-tiered coconut meringue cake decorated with cherry blossoms and skirted with hand-woven lace that told in stitches the story of Diego’s flying contraptions and rescue-wooing attempts.  The villagers were astonished and envious when the old woman passed on the coveted recipe to Rosa, which they had been trying to extract in all manner of ways for years.  Rita insisted that as Diego’s wife she was bound by her love to bake his favourite cake for every birthday, anniversary and special occasion.  Rosa promised to hold it sacred and since that day, has baked almost a thousand coconut meringue cakes.

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Just before she was sent away, Rosa had searched through her father’s architectural papers and found a drawing of the house that he had planned to build before her mother left.  Folding it carefully and hiding it in her stockings, she had taken it with her and over time committed it to memory.  With Diego and his brothers at the helm, he organised for the village to build the house by the brick and beam.  Diego made his own adjustments, which included widening the windows so that wherever Rosa was in the house she would have a view out to the world, planting chestnut trees in the garden and abolishing the use of hedges.

No sooner had they moved in than the house began to swell with Diego’s inventions.  Ropes hung from the ceiling, cogs turned on the walls and buckets zipped along wires.  The maze of contraptions cracked eggs, whisked whites, washed clothes and swept the floor before making the beds and brewing the coffee.  Rosa delighted in Diego’s boundless enthusiasm as he approached each idea with alacrity, his fingers forever inked and the walls chalked with the scribbles of his fresh creations. 

Rosa began teaching at the school and in the evenings she wrote letters to companies asking for donations of equipment to contribute to Diego’s work.  The purse strings had tightened around his ideas after building the house and the recycled materials he was accustomed to fell short of his visions.  Diego had an instinctive knack for pre-empting the desires of the people around him and threw himself into mending and helping the villagers, while putting his own dreams on hold as he allowed his flying machines to gather dust in the shed.

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Beat the remaining butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

Mix the flour and baking powder, milk and vanilla extract in two separate bowls.

Beat the flour mixture into the creamed butter alternately with the milk mixture.  Beat until well mixed.

After a year, Rosa fell pregnant and it was another cause célèbre for the village.  Baby names became subject to public vote and the school began to stitch a quilt.  Diego, inspired by the prospect of fatherhood, set about creating all manner of baby contraptions.  His grand piece was a cot that gently rocked itself in time to the lullabies of a gramophone and reacted to the vibrations of the baby’s cries, rocking faster or slower and sending a signal via a cord to bells in the sitting room which alerted the parents to varying degrees of crying.  Rosa began knitting furiously until she had filled a cupboard with bonnets, cardigans and boots and the villagers donated old toys that brimmed from a trunk at the bottom of the stairs.

When Rosa woke one morning a few months later, the sheets were crimson red.  It was to signal the beginning of years of disappointment and heartache.  Diego’s relentless zest for life waned and he withdrew, his smile wearing a sadness that it would never shake.  Over the seven years that followed Rosa gave birth to five breathless babies, still and peaceful angels that she held in her arms - Robin, Luna, Santiago, Luis, Maria - and each time, it became harder to put them in the ground, harder to hammer another tiny cross into the field.  Rosa ate little and talked less, choosing to spend her days sitting by their graves or watching them from the wide windows meant to deliver the world she had yearned for but now rejected.  Even in death she felt she had to protect them and her duty was to watch over their souls.  She continued to knit them clothes that they would never wear, make toys that they would never play with and to read them stories that she could only hope they heard.  The last time, Diego woke in the night to find Rosa sitting on the cold floor of the bathroom, blood meandering along the grooves of the tiles.  Perfectly formed, it was small enough to fit in Diego’s palm and he held it and Rosa together until the unforgiving sun streamed through the window to remind them that another day had come and life must go on for the living.

It was not long after they submitted to their childless fate that Rosa received a letter from one of the companies she had written to, offering Diego a two-year contract to bring his inventions to life.  The salary surpassed any that they had imagined and it was the break Diego had always dreamt of, but he refused to go.  The company was in a city on the other side of the country, days away, and would require him to live there.  He would not entertain the thought of leaving Rosa, particularly as she needed him now more than ever, but she understood what this would mean for him and, after appealing to the village, it was eventually decided that he would go. 

Once Diego had left, it was as if all the reserves of strength Rosa possessed had gone with him.  With her source of support and comfort in another place, the strings of her heart began to fray and snap, unravelling into despair.  The village gathered around her but she shunned their visits, feigning sickness or hiding in the forest.  Unable to bear the sight of the children that were the same age as her own should have been, she never taught at the school again.  She dared not sleep in case he found her in her dreams and felt her misery.  At night, she drank coffee and paced around the house, often going for long walks or sitting outside in the dark singing to the crosses in the field until morning came and it was safe to sleep.  She disappeared into herself until she barely knew who she was and all that remained constant was her love for Diego.

One morning, six weeks later, Rosa braved the light of day and reluctantly peeled back the curtains.  Standing outside on the path was her man-bird, almost unrecognisable in a suit but still desperately handsome.   The weight of her body lifted and her heart carried her down the stairs and into his arms.  Rosa knew well enough that he had crept into her dreams and sabotaged his work to be with her but she was not sure that she could survive if he left again and did not push him when he told her that his inventions had failed and the company had sent him home.  In the time that he had been in the city he had saved a small nest of money and it was enough for them to pack their bags and float off into the world on his latest flying contraption.  Once again, Rosa and Diego were waved off as they drifted into the clouds, carried this time by a balloon made from the quilts of their lost children, stitched with the love of the villagers and lifted with the flames of hope.

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Whisk the egg whites until peaks form.

Fold the egg whites into the cake mixture until well mixed but do not over mix.

Pour into the prepared cake tins and smooth over with a palette knife.

Bake for 25-30 minutes.

The holes that their dead babies had carved in their hearts were, over time, filled again with the love that they had for each other and the autumn leaves of their sorrow no longer fell.  At last, the boy-bird and the little girl trapped in the garden allowed the world they had long desired to be poured into their hearts as they soared over foreign seas and distant lands.

When they landed on the Great Wall of China, dangling by a thread, they were welcomed with bowls of steaming soup and cups of tea as intrigued lips demanded to know the world that they had come from, while Rosa and Diego marvelled at theirs.  After exchanging worlds, they travelled across golden sands on the humped horses Diego had told a young Rosa of until they reached Tibet where a message was waiting for them from the Maharajah of Udaipur, inviting them to stay on his floating palace in Rajasthan. He had heard of Diego’s stories and inventions and wanted his palace and people to live like the village above the clouds. 

Effortlessly eccentric, the Maharajah relished in Diego’s ideas and provided him with a small army of workers who set about turning the palace into a web of pulleys, bells and ropes.  Dressed in opulent silks and with tales of Europe, the Maharajah held court with his philosophies and beliefs and entertained them with descriptions of boxes that travelled up and down buildings and machines that sent paper across the world.  Diego was in his element and the Maharajah, who became a close friend, encouraged him to push the limits of physics to invent fresh and efficient devices that made the palace the envy of all of India.  Rajasthan became a hub of innovation and the epicentre for freethinking inventors and liberals.  Rosa went back to teaching and, with the help of the Maharajah’s wife, set up a sanctuary for women and children that was the first of its kind.  It was a place where they were safe from the constraints of society and provided an unstructured education that paved the way for a new generation of women.  A few years passed and the thought of the crosses no longer pained Rosa.  Instead she looked upon them with pure love that existed without regret or grief and, in time, allowed herself to laugh again.

With the palace fully self-sufficient and fresh water flowing through the village and all of Rajasthan, it was time for Diego and Rosa to go home, but not before unveiling Diego’s masterpiece.  The Maharajah had delighted in Diego’s talks of becoming a dragonfly and had given him everything he needed in order to build his final flying machine.  And so, in front of crowds of smiling faces and the sweeping of hands, Rosa and Diego set off again in a wooden dragonfly with wings of metal that spun by the power of sugar water and the energy that beat from their hearts.  After hovering over the lake on which their home of the last few years had floated, they drifted off one last time towards the village in the clouds.

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Frosting:

Put the egg whites, sugar and 75ml water in a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water.

Beat slowly until stiff peaks form.

Remove from the heat and beat in vanilla extract.

The frosting should be thick and glossy.

Add three cups of morphine, one of cyanide and a sprig of hemlock.

Mix with fresh tears and allow to set a while before spreading over the cake with a palette knife.

Decorate with grated coconut and drizzle with coconut syrup.

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At first, she noticed an absence of inky fingers and scribbles on the walls.  Then fewer contraptions appeared, less were mended and Diego became ever distant from Rosa.  He spoke only when spoken to, avoided meal times and began to sleep strange hours. 

It was not long before the headaches began to swallow him into a black hole that threatened to steal him away from life.  He developed a shortness of breath and his midnight screams shook the village as he woke, riddled with cramps and cold sweats that dragged his mind away from him.  The blackouts came during the daylight hours and tugged at the curtains of his vision, while the daggers in his stomach forced him to double over and drop to his knees.  He misplaced notepads, forgot dates and struggled to remember names.  When Rosa woke him in the afternoon he shouted at her for the first time and begged her to leave him alone, the thought of which had never occurred to him before.  Doctor Norbeto Isuardi diagnosed a string of ailments: pneumonia, diabetes, anaemia, glaucoma, tonsillitis, yellow fever, dengue and influenza, but no medicine could cure him and painkillers offered only a tenuous relief. 

As Diego deteriorated rapidly, Rosa remained determined to find a cure and wrote letters to the people they had met around the world, asking for advice.  All were as baffled as the next, with the exception of a Japanese aristocrat who had a special interest in tropical diseases and parasites.  The signs convinced him that it was a gluttonous worm, carnivorous and aggressive, that had invaded Diego and warned that at the stage of health he had already progressed to, recovery was doubtful.  Undeterred, Rosa set about procuring the ingredients from far and wide for the remedies he prescribed and administered them to Diego with the silent prayers of a heart that was already breaking.

Diego had days when he was himself again and able to move about the house, tinkering with his gadgets and talking to Rosa with his characteristic vivacity.  On others he was listless and bedridden, unable to engage in the world around him. Though Rosa still refused to believe that he was dying, Diego had noticed his shadow fading and understood that his life was no longer his own and that it would not be long before it was taken from him and claimed by another place.  When he was well enough, they walked, picnicked and read stories, but those moments were tainted with the dark thoughts that gnawed at the edge of their minds suggesting that this might be the last time.  Diego feared the day when Rosa would be burdened with his moribund body to care for him as if a child and the thought of being unable to provide for her ate away at him.  With the strength he had left he quietly made plans for his departure, ensuring that she would be looked after when he was gone and that he would continue to love her from afar. 

A second winter passed, the medicines having slowed the worm, but as spring gently nudged its way through the frost, Diego’s skin yellowed with the daffodils as his liver struggled to support his system.  The parasite had reached his brain and begun to affect his mind and his memory deteriorated, he repeated himself often and spent long hours, sometimes days, asleep.  No longer capable of leaving his bed, the bathroom came to him and his body survived on a diet of drugs and pain alone. 

Rosa finally accepted that she was going to lose Diego when she was clearing out the linen from a cupboard and found a note from him.  It was intended for her to read after his death, to remind her of the love he had for her and that though he would no longer be with her, he would only be a whisper away.  Drying her eyes, she mentioned nothing of the note, but inside a part of her began to die with Diego.  As she went about the chores over the coming months she found pieces of paper all over the house from the future ghost of her husband and each time her heart was chilled by the bitter winds of reality.

No strength of will or strained smiles could hide the darkness in their dreams and when they closed their eyes together at night they entered into each other’s nightmares, the incubus of a world once their solace now reduced to the ashes of their hearts and distorted by the horror of their fate.  Diego knew when he no longer flew in his dreams that there would be no salvation, no miracle, and that his time was coming. The agony increased tenfold in the final months and he could not control his screams as the chronic torment consumed him and nothing, not even the poppy nectar, could relieve his pain.  His cheeks sallow, face contorted and his wrinkles now trenches in the war his body was fighting with itself, Diego came to Rosa in her dream and asked her to do the only thing he had ever asked of her.

Rosa, angry at the world for permitting such a question to exist and at Diego for allowing the death-worm to consume him, at first refused.  She was unable to let him go or consider the thought of losing him sooner than she had to.  She feared being alone in the world that he had built for her and her still stinging heart was afraid to put another cross in the field.

After the tears dried, she understood that she had allowed her desire to hold onto him, despite his pain, to blind her and, knowing that he would never have asked it of her if he were able to bear the agony anymore, Rosa promised to take Diego from one world to another, just as the boy-bird had done for her all those years ago.  The greatest gift of love would be to sacrifice her grief to end his misery.  Her crime would be loving a man and her sentence would be love itself and the heartache that it commands.

Rosa baked the cake three times but none, like her heart, would rise and they only sank further.  On the last attempt, she reluctantly pulled the cake from the oven.  There was something sinister and taunting in its perfection.  As she stirred the frosting, her tears mixing with the poisonous elixir, she forced the seeds of doubt from her mind and dropped the liquid - so innocent in its volume yet loud in its fatal concoction - into the mixture and spread it with trembling hands across the spongy surface.  Upstairs, Diego stirred as the smell of coconut wafted along the corridors, creeping through the house and heralding the end of his life.

Wearing the emerald green dress Diego had given her on their last anniversary, Rosa held the cake with numb fingers and climbed the stairs.  The wings of fear fluttered in her stomach and grief scratched at her heart, and with each step she prayed that God would take him first and deliver her from her murderous duties.  She dried her eyes, pressed her wet palms into the creases of her dress and breathed in hope before she opened the door of the bedroom and closed it on their lives.

The air was damp with sweat and the bitter stench of decay that hung limply but undeterred, a cruel harbinger of fate.  She lay the cake down next to the bed and waited for him to take a breath, slow and rasping, and it was only the gentle rise and fall of his chest that signalled that he was still alive.  Raising the knife to cut the cake into slices, she faltered and rested it on the plate.  Her eyes darted around for salvation and the imperfections of the room glared back at her.  She went about opening the curtains to the setting sun as it bid farewell, fluffing pillows and straightening frames, sourcing any diversion from the moment. When there was nothing left to distract her, she sat down on the edge of the bed and took his hand in hers.  Diego did not open his eyes but squeezed gently to let her know that he was there, with the affirmation to continue with the plan that she had prayed would not come.  Rosa took the knife in her hand and cut a slice with quivering fingers.

No food had passed his mouth for days and he could not swallow the cake, instead he choked and coughed on the dry crumbs.  Rosa put her hand behind his back, the bones of his spine jutting out from his emaciated flesh, and they pierced her palm as she lifted him upright.  A puppet disconnected from its puppeteer, only fragments of the man she loved still remained and, scraping frosting onto a fork, Rosa wet his lips with rum and began to feed him. 

With each mouthful she held her breath as she waited for him to breathe again.  Words came from within her, letters that escaped her mind without direction, searching for one another until a word formed as she suppressed her nerves and pain.  She heard herself repeating her love, comforting him with convictions that she would survive and he would live on in her, in this world that was of their making.  She told him stories of the world on the other side, where she would come and find him, just as in their dreams they would be together, but they were empty, gaping words that floated in the air and found no substance in their host.  Rosa could not imagine a world where they were apart, either in this one or another.  Inside, her heart told another story as it was punched and kicked until it was bruised with a limping beat, the shattered shards piercing her lungs until she could not breathe.

When her screaming thoughts quietened, his chest no longer rose and she felt the cold presence of his absence in the room. Kissing the one solitary tear that ran down his cheek, she allowed hers to cascade from the banks of her eyes and held her face to his.  After months of contorted pain frozen in his expression, he seemed to her to be sleeping.  His body was still warm as she shook him by the shoulders and she was unable to believe that the man she loved had left the body before her.  Laying her head on his chest, it felt foreign not to hear the beat of his heart and it was instead replaced with the sound of her own, obnoxious in its fervour, as it echoed around the room.  Rosa could not imagine how Diego could be dead if the world continued with its work outside, spinning unperturbed while her world grounded to a halt.  She went to the window, as the curtains of night drew across the skies, and asked for the stars to bow their heads and the moon to draw a veil over its garish face in mourning, but they continued to shine brighter than ever, mocking her grief.  A wave of anger tugged at her weakest chords and she turned on Diego for leaving her and the world for taking him.  She woke from herself to find her fists beating against his chest and she collapsed on top of his corpse.  Pulling the sheet around them, she wrapped his arms around her and held onto him as tight as her grieving limbs would allow until her exhausted tears granted sleep to take over from her thoughts.

As Rosa ran through her dark chimeras, calling for Diego, she realised that the world was no longer theirs and that she would not find him in the realms that they had created.  He was in another place that she could not cross into and she wept dream-tears as she stumbled through the memories of their lives together, tripping on the stones of lost hopes.  She drowned in the fiction of those infant dreams, entangled with the nightmares of the past but guided to another, temporary, fantasy.  Afraid of waking up, she drifted lucidly in and out of slumber and every time reality invaded her thoughts she pushed them away with the oars of her heart and dived deeper into the river of tears that waited to swallow her up.  If she opened her eyes to day, she would be real again and she could not live on in that moment, in a world without him.

When the sun finally nudged her to the cruel day, she forgot herself for a blissful, fleeting moment before her shivering body woke her to the unforgiving light of life.  Over the course of the night she had given herself and her love to the cold body that lay beneath her and the little warmth left in her only served to highlight the arctic ice of Diego’s, yet she held on tight.

Rosa imagined what would be waiting for him on the other side and struggled to picture a place if she were not there with him.  If they could not be together in this world or the world of their dreams, then there was nothing left for her.  As she reluctantly prised herself away from the rigid limbs she had wrapped around her, his stiff body was revealed.  His bruised and blackened skin, damaged from the cyanide, was not that of the man that she had given her life to, who was once her life, and she understood that closing her eyes was not enough to cradle his soul with hers.

Rosa stared at the remains of the cake, ignorant of the role it had played, its innocent crumbs scattered around the plate, and thought how irreversibly the world had changed since she was baking in the kitchen.  She lay herself back down next to Diego, the fork in her hand, and thought how delicious it would be to have a slice.

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