Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
ONCE UPON A time a little girl with the name Ella Grace Walsh wanted to be a queen like Queen Elizabeth the Second or Marie Antoinette. It wasn't because they were strong, independent women. It was because being a queen meant you could eat all the cake in the world and never be ridiculed or banned from eating cake. She could order people around to make houses out of cake if she wanted and they would have to listen to her orders or risk being imprisoned. To eat cake when she wanted was a dream. A dream she's had for a decade.
If Ella met the unfortunate events of the apocalypse as a child, the walkers would not scare her, her parents dying would not scare her, but unable to become a queen to eat cake would scare her.
Meeting King Ezekiel meant having all the cake in the world. There was no doubt in Ella's mind King Ezekiel owned loads of cake. Young Ella would go crazy over this meeting (though if she were a child, she wouldn't be going to the Kingdom, she'd stay put at Alexandria or Hilltop). Ella thought of the different kinds of cake he could have — vanilla, chocolate, red velvet, lemon, angel, carrot, strawberry, coconut, marble, apple, babka, banana, batik, pound, baumkuchen, tres leches, bara birth, cupcake, battenberg, chestnut, butter, blackout, blondie, brownie, cheesecake, rainbow, and confetti; her favorite cake.
She couldn't stop imagining all the cake even when they got to the Kingdom and the men on horses arrived. She tried to be present in the moment as the men had them line up to take the guns from Rick and Carl, but she kept going back to her own thoughts. Unfortunately.
The last time she ate cake had to have been at the start of Carl's school year before the apocalypse. They were celebrating what might have been his last year in elementary school, if she remembered correctly. Her mother, Laura, made the cake instead of Lori. The occasion was too special for Carl to let Lori cook the cake. Laura made Carl a chocolate pudding cake all from scratch. She could remember the moment the chocolate fudge sauce hit her tongue, the cake melted away. It was so dark and sweet. The vanilla ice cream sitting atop the cake made it even better. She would kill the entire group of Alexandria for a taste of her mother's homemade chocolate pudding cake.
Other than having cake all the time, why else would King Ezekiel be king? It certainly couldn't be that he actually enjoyed governing people. It had to be because of the cake, there was no other good reason to be king. Peasants kind of sucked, no king or queen actually liked their subjects. As seen in history books. Always rebelling against the royalists. If they just gave them cake once a month. . . there'd be no problems from peasants. Everyone loved cake. Cake brought joy, love, appreciation, and imagination.
Unless it was fruitcake.
Ella never met someone who liked fruitcake. Fruitcake was not made with fruit. Whoever invented fruitcake was a monster. Fruitcake was the villain in every story. Fruitcake was disgusting. Ella could never succumb to eating fruitcake on every occasion instead of the joyous cake she loved so much.
