The sun that illuminated the Baron and the Baroness tasted of lemon juice, the kind that was artificial and came in yellow plastic containers shaped to look like the fruit people had stopped buying for centuries due to its decomposition rate, among other things. The Baroness would only notice years later that immortality had a strange effect on people, that it made them look selfishly toward things that died, that it made them lose their grip on what made them human, that it made them prefer peach ice cream over vanilla. For now, the Baroness was occupied with the sun, and the aquamarine waves of the bacteria-filled ocean, and how to put her goldfish patterned towel down without getting the white crystalish specks of sand to land on it, as the last thing she wanted was an uneven tan due to mislaid grains on her skin. Her stone heart toppled and rolled around in the cavity of her chest as she shook the towel with all her might.
The Baron, meanwhile, had already placed down his towel, his being black and covered with stars, and sat on top of it, hugging his cloth covered legs to his chest. His burgundy hair danced around his face with the shadows and the heat of the wintering daytime. He watched the Baroness in fragile silence, or perhaps he watched the clouds behind her, moving alarmingly fast and shifting like dissolving cotton balls in a mason jar of rubbing alcohol, never staying still and never failing to display stories of the highest caliber, but only for a second, only for a moment before a button on the remote is pressed and they are changed to a different program.
Reaching inside his coat, the Baron pulled out a cigarette box with a girl’s teary-eyed face on the front. He then opened the girl’s forehead and stole a cigarette from her mind; it was black, from the filter to the almost invisible logo on the side of it- not that the logo was readable anyway, as it was in the language of cats, and the Baron himself was not a cat, and neither are you. He examined it for a bit before putting it between his lips, unlit. The Baroness, beside him, had succeeded to place down her towel in a manner that pleased her, and was laying on it, her stomach toward the sky and her flax-colored hair spread out around her head like a halo or a circle of some sort of satirical holiness. Her head was turned toward the Baron.
“I hate you,” the Baroness whispered in his direction. The waves retreated away from them like rippers from a crime scene and the low tide began. “I wish you were dead.”
“You don’t mean that,” said the Baron. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, and stared into the horizon. Far away, seagulls with seaglass stuck in their wings bled into the ocean while emitting the sort of sounds one could easily find inside an instrumental version of a popular hypnosis cd. “You’re only saying that because everything in your life is working out, and you aren’t used to that. You shouldn’t be blaming it on me, anyway. I haven’t done anything.”
“You say my life is better,” said the Baroness, “but I don’t recall feeling this much pain since the time you convinced everyone I wasn’t real.”
“I’m not going to apologize for that, Evangeline.” said the Baron.  A wind rose and seven grains of sand fell on his eyelashes.
“I hate you,” said the Baroness. Her spearmint colored eyes attempted to burn holes in his skin.
“You don’t mean that,” said the Baron. The cigarette was back in his mouth, and now there was smoke coming from it, though there was no lighter in sight. “What are you going to do, then? With his heart?” he said while pointing to the white leather purse that lay beside the Baroness.
“I don’t know,” said the Baroness. She seemed deep in thought. “I wanted to kill it for a while, you know. Let it dry up in the sun, or just throw it into the garbage compactor.”
“But you longed so much for it, when you didn’t have it,” said the Baron, a smile creeping up from the depths of his emotions. “You were craving it so much it started slipping into your dreams, Evangeline. You were bursting with love, as much as a thing like you can love. It was more like desire, now that I think about it…” he trailed off. Something odd glimmered in his eyes.
“It wasn’t desire, it was love. I knew it from the way it clawed at my bones and pushed down on my back. Desire isn’t painful,” she said.
“So you say,” said the Baron, “and so you grew tired of ‘loving’.”
“So I did. And so one day I asked him for his heart, and I received it, and everything I had felt disappeared. Instead, I felt sad. Deathly sad,” she said. She lifted up her body, slowly, and moved to a seated position before searching through her bag and pulling out a neon turquoise jewelry box held closed by a wooden lock embraced by blossoming ivy. “And so I put it in here. But every time I looked back at it, it changed.”
“Really?” said the Baron. He kneeled and leaned toward the Baroness, his hands grasping the sand in front of him. “The heart changed?”
“Yes. It grew, or it changed color, or it gained the ability to sing, and from then on it would sing songs of the things I loved most in this world, and of the things that I loved that I would never dare tell anyone that I loved for fear that they would laugh at me. Day by day, his heart grew more and more flawless, and I began to desire it again, but if I held it open for two long the desire would dissolve and I would grow displeased with the smallest faults,” said the Baroness.
“So you do admit you felt desire?” said the Baron.
“I felt desire then, but not before the heart came into my possession,” she said. “Then, it was love.”
“So you say,” said the Baron.
“So after the heart lost its sheen, I would put it back in the box, but the next time I took it out it would be filled with new wonderments. Frighteningly enough, it began to look like the prince’s heart I had dreamed of so long ago, you remember the one?” she said. The Baron tipped his head to side.
“I don’t remember the heart, but I do remember the prince. I remember laughing at the ridiculousness of it all- and I remember you asking for a dance but receiving nothing,” the Baron said. He exhaled smoke, watching it drift apart and mingle with the air around them. It paralleled the lazy grey clouds that slumped around them, moving as a sluggish army intent on covering the earth, but only tomorrow.
“I didn’t ask for a dance,” said the Baroness. “I didn’t ask for anything. I was too busy waiting for the heart to jump into my hands.”
“But it didn’t,” said the Baron.
“But it didn’t,” said the Baroness. Her fingernails drew patterns across the lid of the box. “Do you want me to open it?”
“I think you want to open it more than I do,” said the Baron, but the Baroness knew he was lying by the way the cigarette smoke around him changed directions. When he saw her staring with the sort of expression that suggested she knew more than him, he waved the smoke away and it quickly disappeared, but not before turning a blinding white color, the kind no one wants to touch as it dwells near lightning bolts and sticky sicknesses. The Baroness reached into the small hole in the center of her chest and pulled out her heart- a volcanic stone of brickish red about the size of a walnut still in its shell. It looked like a firm grasp could crumble it to bits, but it was actually quite durable and able to withstand even the hardest of throws against the toughest cemented walls. She took the heart, her heart, and pressed it against the wooden lock with the ivy, which then came unlocked. Slowly, carefully, she pulled open the lid.
    The heart was magnificent. It glowed with the color of the sun on a wasteful day, and it hummed such songs that wrapped around the mind and wouldn’t let go for days. It seemed to be made of sugar turned to glass, it seemed to drip both blue blood and crimson simultaneously, it seemed to emit a light steam that could recede into dewdrops at any moment and tasted like warm winter days and cool summer nights. Through blinks it looked like a hyacinth, and if you looked at it from far away it resembled a sunflower with seeds of opals and petals of liquid gold.
“It keeps doing this,” said the Baroness while putting her heart back into her chest. Each second she noticed something more beautiful, and each second the air around her became tighter while an incessant need to lay down and sleep forever stroked her pinkish cheeks. “Look at that steam. How do you think it knows what I find wonderful? I’ve never even written these wishes down,” she said, “and here it is. My exact definition of wonderful.”
“I think it’s frightening,” said the Baron. His gaze on the heart didn’t falter as he reached toward it, pricking his finger with a touch to the surface. White blood flowed from his thumb and fell on the sand in tiny puddles. “But there is a certain elegance to it all, I give you that, Evangeline.”
“I know,” said the Baroness. “I know. I possess this heart. It’s mine. I don’t have to do anything to get it to be mine because it’s already mine. I don’t need to desire it because it’s right in front of me, and it belongs to me. This heart is mine. Did you know this heart is mine?”
“It is yours, isn’t it,” said the Baron. He leaned back and gazed, exhaling more smoke while blood continued to run from the hand that held his cigarette. White mixed with black and brought about grey, and then it started thundering off in the distance while light rains fell from the sky onto the Baroness and the Baron and the heart.
“It’s going to die in the end, isn’t it?” said the Baroness. The Baron nodded. Slowly, the Baroness closed the box. “How do you think it’s going to die?” She said as she clasped together the lock and regained the air in her lungs.
“Maybe you’ll kill it,” said the Baron.
“Maybe,” said the Baroness.
“Sorry about telling everyone you didn’t exist,” said the Baron.
“It’s alright,” said the Baroness. The rain fell like a wild stampede, crushing all tiny things in its path. The Baron took an umbrella out of his coat and opened it, holding it out for himself and the Baroness, who got her things together and joined him under its bell shape. They hummed the song of the heart as they walked into the southern ocean.