A Blonde Heard That Milk Baths!

In the quiet, picturesque suburb of Willow Creek, where the lawns were manicured to a surgical precision and the gossip was as fresh as the morning dew, lived a woman named Cassandra. Cassandra was a woman of undeniable striking presence—a tall, luminous blonde with a penchant for high-fashion catalogs and an unwavering belief that the secrets to eternal youth were hidden in the ancient rituals of history.

One sweltering Tuesday afternoon, while leafing through a vintage beauty periodical in her sun-drenched parlor, Cassandra came across a passage detailing the legendary skincare routines of Cleopatra. The Queen of the Nile, the article claimed, had maintained her velvet-smooth complexion and radiant glow by immersing herself daily in a tub filled with fresh milk. To Cassandra, this wasn’t just a historical anecdote; it was a divine revelation. She looked at her reflection in the gilded hallway mirror, spotting a microscopic line near her left eye, and decided that the time for drastic, dairy-based measures had arrived.

The next morning, she penned a note for her milkman, Arthur, who had been delivering glass bottles to the neighborhood for three decades. The note was brief, written on scented lavender stationery, and placed prominently in the empty crate on her porch: “Dear Arthur, please deliver 25 gallons of whole milk tomorrow morning. No bottles. Just the bulk. I have a project.”

When Arthur arrived at 5:15 a.m., the soft clinking of his truck the only sound in the predawn silence, he picked up the note and squinted. He adjusted his spectacles, certain that the morning fog was playing tricks on his eyes. Twenty-five gallons? In his thirty years of service, the most he had ever delivered to a single residence was five gallons for a neighborhood Fourth of July ice cream social. He stared at the “25,” noting the lack of a decimal point. Surely, he reasoned, she meant 2.5 gallons—enough for a few large bowls of cereal and perhaps a very ambitious batch of yogurt.

Being a man of integrity and neighborly concern, Arthur decided he couldn’t simply leave a small pond of milk on the porch without a word. He returned at 8:30 a.m., after his route was finished, and gave the heavy brass knocker on Cassandra’s door three firm raps.

The door swung open, and Cassandra appeared, draped in a silk kimono that shimmered like a pearl. She looked at Arthur with a mixture of curiosity and impatience.

“Good morning, Arthur,” she said, her voice melodic. “I trust you received my order?”

Arthur tipped his cap, looking slightly flustered. “Good morning, Miss Cassandra. I did indeed receive your note. But I felt obligated to check in. It says here you want twenty-five gallons. I thought perhaps the pen might have slipped, and you meant two-and-a-half? That’s still quite a bit of milk, mind you, but much more manageable than twenty-five.”

Cassandra offered a small, knowing smile—the kind one gives to a child who doesn’t quite understand the complexities of the world. “No, Arthur. I was quite deliberate. Twenty-five gallons is exactly what I require. You see, I’ve decided to follow in the footsteps of royalty. I am going to fill my bathtub with milk and take a prolonged soak. I intend to emerge looking as young and beautiful as I did a decade ago. It’s a matter of biological preservation.”

Arthur blinked. He had heard many things over the years—strange diets, odd hobbies, neighborhood feuds—but a full-scale bathtub immersion in dairy was a first. He did a quick mental calculation of the volume of a standard alcove tub versus the displacement of a human body.

“Well,” Arthur said, rubbing the back of his neck. “If that’s what you’re set on, I suppose I can make a special trip back to the depot. It’ll take a few trips with the handcart to get it all inside. But I have to ask for the sake of the invoice: Do you want it pasteurized?”

Cassandra paused. She tilted her head, her blonde locks catching the morning light as she pondered the technicality. She had heard the word before in science documentaries, usually associated with high temperatures and the elimination of bacteria. She imagined a tub of steaming, boiling milk, and a look of horror crossed her face. She didn’t want to be cooked; she wanted to be rejuvenated.

“Pasteurized?” she asked, her voice rising in a tone of mild offense. “Goodness, no! Just up to my boobs. I’ll need a little room at the top so I can splash it on my eyes without it overflowing.”

The silence that followed was heavy with Arthur’s internal struggle to maintain his professional composure. He looked at Cassandra, whose expression was one of pure, earnest logic. She wasn’t joking; she was simply operating on a completely different frequency of reality. To her, “pasteurized” wasn’t a process of heat-treating liquids to kill pathogens; it was a measurement of depth—specifically, a height that reached past her chin.

“I see,” Arthur managed to say, his voice strained as he fought back a chuckle. “Up to the… yes. Not ‘past-your-eyes.’ I understand perfectly now.”

“I thought you would,” Cassandra said, satisfied. “I don’t want to submerge my entire head, Arthur. That seems excessive. A nice, soothing soak up to the shoulders, with just enough room to gently pat the milk onto my eyelids. That is the secret to a youthful gaze, according to the Queen of Egypt.”

Arthur took a deep breath, nodding slowly as he backed down the porch steps. “I’ll go fetch the truck, Miss Cassandra. I’ll bring the ‘un-pasteurized’ milk right away. I’ll make sure it stops exactly where you need it to.”

“Thank you, Arthur,” she called out as she closed the door. “Efficiency is such a rare quality these days!”

Arthur walked back to his milk truck, the engine idling with a steady thrum. He sat in the driver’s seat for a full minute, staring at the steering wheel. He thought about the twenty-five gallons of milk currently sitting in the refrigerated hold of the depot, and he thought about the sheer, unwavering confidence of the woman behind the door. He realized then that beauty might be skin deep, but a certain kind of logic was bone-deep.

As he drove away to fulfill the most unusual order of his career, he couldn’t help but wonder if Cleopatra had ever had a milkman quite as patient as he was. He also made a mental note to check back in a few days—not to see if she looked younger, but to see if she had figured out how exactly one goes about draining twenty-five gallons of room-temperature milk without creating a neighborhood-wide olfactory catastrophe.

In Cassandra’s house, the water—or rather, the dairy—was about to be drawn. She moved toward the bathroom, humming a tune of ancient royalty, convinced that by noon, she would be the most radiant woman in Willow Creek, regardless of whether the milk reached her eyes or merely her waistline. After all, in the pursuit of beauty, a little misunderstanding of terminology was a small price to pay for the promise of a porcelain glow.