“It’s twins, look! You got twins.” Eve did so wish that Gabriel would stop referring to the binary-yolked egg he was preparing for her like that. It was, to put none too fine a point on it, disgusting. And instantly made Eve think of it as some kind of mutant food entity, a depraved product of DuPont or Monsanto (for Lord knows both corporations have their tentacles in the sustenance industry) that she would sooner retch over than consume. Gabriel, for whatever reason, could not see it that way. To him, it was “cute” and “a good omen.” Eve found the phenomenon to be every antonym of both. She barked as much to Gabriel from her perch on the easy chair in the corner of the living room that gave her the perfect vantage point from which to watch him cooking in the kitchen. It had been two weeks since the accident, and she had only come home from the hospital three days ago. Both were still adjusting to their new roles, she as the taken care of, he as the caretaker. 

Throughout all ten years of their marriage, the relationship had survived based on this sole factor alone. Plus the fact that Gabriel was often at work, leaving Eve to her own devices as she puttered around the house in spurts and fits of cleaning. She was the hausfrau Gabriel had been conditioned to seek out by his own mother, who was just the same. She could also make any recipe he desired, even the most far-flung of exotic cuisines, from spätzle to moules à la crème Normande. There was nothing out of her wheelhouse. And that was, indeed, Gabriel soon came to realize, the crux of why he loved her so. With this ability stripped away from her after her car collision, which left two of her legs and one of her arms broken, a chasm in their dynamic did not take long to open up, all compounded by Gabriel’s latest culinary disaster: persisting in bringing up the “magic” of her “twin egg,” or what he had taken to calling a “Gemini huevo,” himself the same zodiac sign and the two of them living in San Diego, where Spanish is more the primary language than the secondary. This final nickname was what sent her hobbling to the bathroom to vomit. The thought of eating his mutant cuisine was more repellent to her than the antibiotics she was taking that also tended to make her throw up (or was that just the Vicodin she had additionally been prescribed?). 

Yet he kept going about the preparations, immune to the sounds of her gagging and coughing “offstage,” as it were. He had come too far in trying to make this meal for her to turn back, and no amount of her hemming and hawing (or hurling and heaving) was going to stop him now. He was doing his best, and it was still early days for him as a chef, after all. Which was why he was trying to start with something as simple as poached eggs. Then again, maybe scrambled would have been simpler. But he did so want to please her, especially after all the years of gustatorial pleasing she had done for him.

When she reemerged, roughly five minutes later, he had placed a plate with the Gemini huevo atop one half of an English muffin and another normal egg on the other half. The Frankenstein concoction was then slapped onto a sad TV tray that Gabriel had pushed toward the easy chair. Staggering on her crutches, Eve screamed in horror at the yolk duo. She picked the plate up with her still functioning arm and thrust it against the wall, leaving a dramatic smear of yellow dripping against the oxblood-colored paint. “What the hell are you trying to do to me? Make me die of being grossed out when I could’ve just died in that accident?!”

Gabriel cowered in fright at this outburst, having never really seen Eve get so animated in all their years together. He had failed her and could think of nothing to say other than, “I was just trying to show you that the egg might not actually look as ‘gross’ as you thought.” 

“Well it fucking does.” She stared daggers at him as she stumbled toward the kitchen.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m making my own goddamn lunch, okay? And it won’t include the use of a so-called ‘Gemini huevo’ as you’ve foully coined it.” Opening the refrigerator, it was then that Eve had the epiphany that essentially any dish she might want to make for herself would require an egg. Whether it was cotoletta alla milanese or latkes, everything she seemed to have a craving for contained an egg in the recipe. And it irked her to no end as she gave a side-eye to Gabriel, silently blaming him because there was no one else to blame for her unquenchable desires nor the fact that every egg she subsequently cracked into a bowl consisted of “twins.” Gemini huevo after Gemini huevo that sent her into a screaming hysteria as she fled the kitchen and made her way to the bedroom, falling backward onto the mattress in defeat. She found herself suddenly very drowsy, surrendering to the sleepiness that overtook her. 

When she awakened, what felt like hours later, she rubbed her eyes furiously, as though that might, in turn, abrade away more quickly the stupor still engulfing her. She rose from the bed and went to open the curtains. Night had arrived, and with it an unmistakable stillness. She called out to Gabriel, for the silence was all at once deafening. Was it possible that her outburst had actually driven him away? That he would truly abandon her when the road got rough(er than it was than when she had gotten in that accident)? Just when she thought this could very well be the case, she meandered achingly toward the living room to see his silhouette illuminated by the moonlight. 

“Gabriel? What’s going on? Why are you just sitting here in the dark?” She abruptly turned the light on to find that his two eyes had been replaced by a giant conjoined twin of an egg yolk, bulbous and bulging–making him appear to be some sort of (technically) edible bumblebee. She shrieked in appallment more than horror. Just when she thought she had rid herself of the Gemini huevo, here it was, back with a vengeance on her husband’s face. She had only two choices (as everything was seeming to boil down to dualness today): let her husband live or bash him in the face so as to gouge his eyes out completely and rid herself of the nauseating sight. It had to be the latter. What other choice did she have? How could she go on looking at Gabriel like that? There was no other option. To honor his memory, however, she decided to at least use the now smashed yolk in the cotoletta recipe she had been fantasizing about earlier. Maybe a Gemini huevo wasn’t so sickening after all. As for Gabriel, whose deflated corpse was a real eyesore in the middle of the room as she ate from her TV tray, well, she would have to move him out of the way once she had nursed herself back to health with her own cooking.