Hatched Read Free Page A

stranger was removing his gloves in anticipation of brushing his hand against hers as she approached him. Then, suddenly formal, he adroitly slid his fingers back into their allotted spaces and nodded in her direction. Jessica, as though acknowledging his sign, drew up alongside of his towering presence. The newly formed couple moved towards the exit, in close proximity to one another, but with an estranged physical distance. Jude realized he was staring again, and suddenly he wished that he’d given a witty retort to her good-luck wishes.
    “Break an egg! Bake a leg! Stroke a peg!” Jude was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “Fuck! I don’t know. Tap a keg!” Each brilliant reply resonated in his brain as loudly as if he’d stood on the table and announced them all. Probably better that he didn’t say anything, he thought.
    Tina was now upon Jude, attending to his table by replacing the fork and arranging the place setting that he had sullied with the crushed eggshells and the remnants of the gooey yolk. Jude could not have known that her actions had nothing whatsoever to do with him. Her perfidiousness was aimed towards Jessica, for she had left her place in the kitchen and had interacted with this client, and she had done so without the delicacies appropriate to a dining room like this one.
    Tina’s finicky arranging and rearranging of the plate, the fork, and the napkin was a form of coded communication. In the restaurant, each dominion has its rulers, its keepers, its patrons, and its slaves, and nobody, except the owner and the maître d’, had the right to cross from one dominion into the other, not even Jessica. Jessica was the deity of Fabergé, the goddess of lushness and potency amidst a universe of unfertilized eggs, but this wasn’t her realm. This was Tina’s realm.
    When she was done, Tina simply smiled robotically in Jude’s direction and walked towards the maître d’s station. She occupied that post so that Fabergé Restaurant would be a place of heavenly eggsistence. Fabergé, while guarded by Tina, could never become the lost paradise of Milton, where the guards at the gate were sin and death, evil twins who would be unleashed from the dark premises once permeated. No, as long as Tina was there to guard the roost with her perfect demeanor, Fabergé’s eggs would have their namesake in human form. By virtue of her perfection, Tina was like that golden Fabergé hen egg Czar Alexander III had offered to his wife, Empress Maria Fedorovna, in honor of the twentieth anniversary of their betrothal. Fabergé had crafted his masterpiece from gold, which he wrapped in an enameled shell. Rather than crack, this egg could open on tiny golden hinges, revealing a golden yolk. Therein was hidden a perfect, golden hen that also opened, offering a minute diamond replica of the imperial crown, from which a small ruby pendant was suspended. A precious crown jewel, fit for a czar’s empress, a token of pure, unadulterated, royal love.
    Ah, but looks can be deceiving.
    Long before Fabergé Restaurant had been laid into the nest of New York City, Jessica was a young student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Tina one of the precious female models. A muse to Jessica’s designs, Tina offered herself up, first to Jessica’s penetrating gaze, and then to her gentle, probing touch. Tina, who now hovers quietly inside of John’s Fabergé Restaurant, was once clothed in Jessica’s fashionable creations, and then unclothed by Jessica’s desires. Amidst their heated embrace, did Jessica ever discover the many secrets harbored deep inside of Tina? Would this tall, dark stranger uncover Jessica’s hidden truths?
     
    I don’t know where Jessica went with that stranger in black. I don’t know where anyone goes when they leave Fabergé Restaurant. I do know that she is indeed Jessica, for those who know her, and Jess for those who know her well. And I know that the stranger is always dressed in black, and