The show has a lot of viewers. People like watching the bakers compete. They like watching these contestants grapple with their dreams of professional success. These are the stories people want. It’s the American Dream. Amateurs realizing their passion, or at the very least having that passion validated. Viewers can tell these bakers have an emptiness inside them. A clear, spiritual asymmetry caused by the economic, ecological, and geopolitical uncertainties that are largely outside our control, but which we all feel deeply whether we want to admit it or not. It’s something we see in the shadow of our own souls. We relate, so we watch.

Steve mixes his butter-cream and looks intently over at Betty with his one eye. Betty is beautiful. She has an eye in the middle of her forehead, just like he does, but she has two more eyes set below that one, right above the lily hue of her cheeks. Not a common mutation as far as mutations go, just like Steve’s one eye. Anyway, Betty is beautiful regardless. Everyone agrees she’s gentle with the other contestants, gracious. The spots of flower and chocolate splotches on her apron whisper tones of a genuine, inviting spirit, one that’s open, aggregable, and ultimately fascinating, like a sunflower has appeared in the kitchen, kindly greeted everyone, and then started making raspberry swirl sugar cookies.

Steve falls in love instantly when he walks on set and sees Betty for the first time. After a few episodes it’s as plain and bright as the ruby dotted chestnut iris that rings his pupil that he doesn’t care who wins, not if he can have her the same way he wants her to have him. We can tell that he wishes he could put these feelings into words but can’t. That he can barely keep them from pouring out of his heart like molten fudge from a freshly cut lava cake. Later, in interviews, he’ll chalk it up to gutlessness and then laugh and ask: how do you tell someone that you imagine they’re a love goddess, especially when this goddess of love is already married?

He is drawn to her the same way he was drawn to Cathy Baker, the three-eyed girl in his fourth-grade class who told him once that it was ok to cry and that she liked his eye even if all the other kids made fun of him for it. He thinks he may have been in a sort of love you only find in fourth graders. He lost touch with Cathy a long time ago. They went to different middle schools. It was such an innocent time when the mutations were new and seemed like a big deal. We were all so naive. Anyway, Steve heard from a friend Cathy got married a while back.

It’s a problem, this marriage thing. Not Cathy’s marriage, but Betty’s. When we watch, most viewers know it must be even if we can’t see her husband standing just off camera as his wife bakes.

Of course, he’s a nice guy. He’s a retired lawyer with a successful practice who does pro-bono work now. His third eye, he says, helps give him perspective. If that weren’t enough, he works at a soup kitchen on the weekends. He’s really and truly one of those rare, good people you run into in this world.

But anyone, or at least anyone watching who can count, can tell there’s a problem. Betty and her husband are not right for each other. Together they have the wrong number of eyes. Three plus three is six after all. Steve is baffled no one points this out. Not that it needs to be. He’s sure that they, just like everyone else, know that the two of them together have enough eyes for three people. There’s no balancing that equation. It’s askew, irregular, incorrect. Where’s the romance in that? It’s gone is where it is. Gone.

Steve wonders, we wonder, everyone wonders is it possible Betty’s unhappy? Could it be she’s been waiting for someone else this whole time?

The cameras are filming. She looks over to Steve’s station. He’s making filling for his strudel. Strudel is his specialty. It’s been proven to open the doors of the heart no matter how rusted. It’s how he got on the show.

 It's while she’s looking at him whisking sauce that he looks back at her kneading dough that she smiles at him. It happens. It’s on camera, and the whole world sees it. They must be thinking the same thing. How could they not. All you have to do is count their eyes. All the swirling color of their irises complimenting each other, like valleys, mist, fog, and dawn all together, painting a perfect picture of unspoiled grace and refinement.

It is too bad for her ex-lawyer husband who does pro-bono work when he’s not at the food kitchen. Even the viewers at home think it’s too bad. We all do. But Betty and her husband are so busy. It’s hard to imagine they’re able to spend much time together. Betty with her baking and her husband with his lawyering and food kitchen-ing; a food kitchen that, because of the world we live in, gets busier and busier every month and demands more and more of his time. It’s easy to grow apart in these situations. Situations where both partners have their own lives to live.

It’s not their fault, really. They know this. They know they both deserve happiness, and that’s what they’re doing. They’re doing the work of being happy. It’s a wonderful thing. It is, but it’s not what lovers do. Everyone has needs, and from the moment he meets her, Steve can tell they need each other. That she needs to be worshiped. That she needs someone who doesn’t just appreciate her and isn’t with her just because their marriage is convenient for their personal goals and their sense of contentment. In her life there is an absence of what he offers, and Steve can see her desire. He sees it in the space between her pupils and irises that she desires a union so powerful that it drowns out all other noise. All other news. He can see it in all three of her eyes.

And, the whole world can see it when she smiles at him, and he smiles back. Betty’s husband, who has 20/20/20 vision, sees it too. 

After the baking competition, Steve and Betty meet for coffee. They sit outside at an adorable little café across from a botanical garden. It’s one of the last nice spots in the city. They do not talk about their country or any others. The poverty. The numerous foreign wars threatening to spill out of their regions. They do not talk about the weather. They talk about the show. How neither of them won. How they have so many fans now who appreciate what they do. They drink chai lattes and walk through the garden, ogling flowers like summer bees. He talks about how hard it is for small bakeries with the way everything is right now. She nods. Everyone’s distracted. There’s too much at stake. So much is on the brink of collapse.

Betty swings her head to take in the pink and blue hues of the horizon. A sky that used to be marble blue now looks more like cotton candy ice cream. She asks him for his strudel recipe. She rewatched his parts of the show several times and still can’t get it quite worked out.

You want my strudel? He asks. Yes, she says, all three eyes lighting up. I want your strudel.

Betty and Steve make love then. Not in the flowers but in Betty’s bed. Their fans, us, we, imagine this connection is ethereal. The attraction resulting from pure energies colliding in some vaporous space. It is as though each of their passions is not their own. That they do and always have belonged to the other. Their love is like baking, it’s all chemical collisions and harmony, and when they’re finished, they’re unified. They’re made as beautiful as new honey still in its comb. When they are finished, they feel as if the universe was designed so that the two of them could have this moment; so that the two of them could find each other and be together. There’s nothing in the news, nothing happening across town or around the globe, that could stop them from feeling this way.

Betty says, I love you.

Steve says, I know. I love you too.

No. Betty’s husband is at the door, his bitter shadow stretching across the room and filling the space between them. No, he says again, tears in his eyes. In his hands is a freshly baked marble rye from the deli down the road. It falls to the floor with a heavy thud.

This is not what Steve wanted. Nor, Betty. Few people do. Only villains set out to break hearts, and Betty and Steve are not villains. They didn’t want to hurt him. They just didn’t think. But that’s the problem, isn’t it. They didn’t think about him, and this is the way hearts get broken.

So now here’s Betty’s husband, standing in the doorway, handling his feelings like good men do in situations like these. Both Steve and Betty are speechless. All they can do is stare at Betty’s three-eyed husband who is silently weeping as he slowly backs out of the room.

Neither Betty or Steve worry that he’s gone to get a knife or a gun or to make plans to kill them both and dump their bodies in an old rock quarry. One might expect this given the world they live in. The crime. The instability. But this isn’t that kind of story. Betty’s husband isn’t that kind of guy.

Steve tells himself that he could explain, if only Betty’s husband would let them.

What Steve doesn’t admit, but has hopes for in the bleak recesses of his heart, is that he never sees Betty’s husband again. He hopes that deep down, once he’s able to see through the latticework of his despair, he’ll have to ask himself, who is he to soil this simple unity?

And of course this is what happens. Steve doesn’t see him again. What’s more astonishing is neither does Betty. Her husband walks out the door and is never heard from again.

But what about the memory of him and the guilt for what they’ve done. Do these linger? Perhaps they should. Look around. The world is falling apart. Maybe they’re to blame in some small way. Maybe everyone who places themselves at the center of all things should shoulder some of that blame. Maybe everyone watching this baking show needs to understand this. It’d be reasonable to think we should. And, in other stories on other reality shows about other people on other networks, perhaps we would. Perhaps the shadow of Betty’s husband would stay between them for the rest of whatever time they had left, leaving behind nothing but a sour taste in everyone’s mouth. This doesn’t happen though. Time moves forward and what they get is what they got before, a neat and present joy big enough to fill the two of them so full their souls overflow into their recipes and décor and bakery patrons and children and nurseries.

What do you think, boy or girl? Will they look like you or me? How many eyes do you think they’ll have? One? Two? Three? Four? Does it matter? It does not, mostly because the story ends here. And everyone loves it. Betty and Steve tell their story at the reunion show, hands on Betty’s baby bump, and it’s a very satisfying ending.

Why? Because this is where the producers decide it needs to end. It’s often the case that this world is asymmetrical, and no one with good taste could argue that there is much beauty in that asymmetry. It’s in so many shows. When youthink about it, it turns out that almost everything about us is asymmetrical. Our eyes. Our legs. Our hands and ears. The rich and the poor. The sick and the well. The haves and have nots and the weak and the powerful. The living and the dead. None of them line up the way we wished they would, especially not in this world. There’s this trick question. Where on Earth can you find the most perfect circle? The answer is Earth. What seem like huge flaws in perfection. Mount Everest and the Grand Canyon, they would barely register if we ever got so big we could stand over the solar system, gobsmacked with the elegance of it all. The sun, moons, and planets, spinning through eternity. This perspective makes sense, and that’s what we all want, really. Just one way of seeing, one focus, that makes any sense at all.

We’ve had enough of finding beauty in asymmetry. Viewers of the show don’t want to find grace in those things which do not align. They do enough of that in their real lives. Instead they want this, a story about two imperfect people, two bakers, one with a single eye and one with three eyes, finding each other and creating symmetry where there was none before. This story is about the love, beauty, and the elegance that comes from that. It doesn’t matter what happened before. It especially doesn’t matter what comes after. It’s about seeing something that makes sense to us, even if only a little bit, in a world that gets more twisted every day, and that’s why it ends right here.

by Robin Wyatt Dunn, with Perchance                             

Saul Lemerond lives with his wife, daughter, and their dog in Madison, Indiana where he teaches Creative Writing at Hanover College.