Gabrielle Union opened her eyes, having trained herself to wake the instant the sun crept over the horizon. She stretched across her linen-wrapped divan and looked over at Marcus Aurelius, who had returned from the dead in order to read to her while she ate breakfast.

“You’re sure you don’t mind?” she had asked when he appeared carrying her perfectly poached eggs and six roasted asparagus spears last March.

“Please,” he said, raising his hand dismissively. “It was nothing. I would cross more than the river Styx to watch you get ready in the morning.”

Gabrielle Union laughed a low, musical laugh, and a group of snow-white storks stopped in the middle of their migration to Norway to build a nest atop her chimney in the hope of hearing that laugh again.

“What do you want to do today, Gabby?” Marcus asked. “Cure something? Develop an all-female version of Julius Caesar for the Pasadena Playhouse? Check on your polar bear-red panda hybrids in the Arctic Greenhouse Pods? Watch Being Mary Jane with the sound off and do funny voices for all the characters who aren’t you?”

Gabrielle Union pursed her lips decisively, and somewhere cosmetologist Bobbi Brown felt ice enter her heart before falling to the ground. “No,” she said firmly. “Today I want to invent a wine.”

“But, Gabby –” Marcus began. Gabrielle held up her hand.

“Marcus, today I invent wine.”

He inclined his head gently. “What kind of wine will you invent.”

She unfolded her perfect limbs from the divan and paced around the room. “Chardonnay. Pear Chardonnay. And I want women to drink it while wearing those long sweater things, you know, the thick cashmere kind that are sort of cut flatteringly against the hips and you can wear them over leggings or even like a shift, you know what I mean…”

“Sweater dresses?”

“Right. Sweater dresses. I want women to wear sweater dresses and sit on ivory couches and drink it out of incredibly clean fishbowls and I want it to taste like a meteor that’s been snatched out of the coldness of space and cracked open to reveal its pure, sweet, molten heart that’s been untouched by light or by heat since its birth in a star.”

“…birth…in a star,” Marcus muttered, trying to take notes as quickly as Gabrielle was talking. “And what shall people call this wine of yours?”

“Vanilla Puddin.”

“Vanilla Pudding?”

“Puddin. No G.”

“Puddin’ with an apostrophe?”

“No. No apostrophe. It’s not “pudding” with a g dropped from the end, it’s Puddin. It’s its own word. Puddin. People will get it.”

Gabrielle looked out the window, and her eyes were as cold and as old as a mountain of granite. “People will get it.”

[Image via Essence]