Hatched Read Free Page B

that in her presence, he always stares straight ahead, through space and through time. And then he approaches her, and, like today, he removes his gloves and gently slides the side of his hand upon hers, almost imperceptibly. His sole objective seems to be to breathe the air that she exhales, and to sense the golden warmth of her hair, golden locks that entangle everyone around her.
As Jessica strayed from view, Jude stayed behind for a little while longer, adding and subtracting from the words he’d written about the intact egg and its shattered nemesis, and about the yolk, into whose large, yellow eye he stared from time to time, in between long reflections at his table. While he performed his linguistic fussing, Tina walked around him, preparing the dining room for guests, real guests. Unlike Jude, guests were people who actually spent money in Fabergé Restaurant, as opposed to buying one of the “intermezzo’s,” as John called them. The intermezzo that served as Jude’s main course was concocted as a frivolous little delight that properly affluent clients savor in between actual courses. Jude’s favorite intermezzo was the egg-shaped, vanilla-flavored scoops of coconut sorbet. This popular little trifle was acceptable in Fabergé Restaurant, because the coconut is an egg. But is it really an egg? Or is it a seed? Is it a fruit? Or is it a nut? In Fabergé Restaurant, the answer is clear, because one of John’s dessert recipes joyfully transforms coconut flesh into egg whites, which are then placed alongside the yolky flesh of ripe mangos. Fabergé Restaurant, where each egg is a fantasy, each fantasy a resurrection. I know, because I am the Fabergé Restaurant, and I myself am a resurrected fantasy.

Chapter 2
    Jude lingered after Jessica’s departure, feeling aroused. He had never seen her before. She clearly worked in the kitchen, so why had she appeared in the dining room today? He turned his gaze back to Tina, whom he’d seen many times in that dining room, fussing over guests or arranging place settings. For him, Tina was an enigma, but he found her strangely enticing. He would celebrate her image on those occasions when his fantasies led him towards untouchable innocence. He never saw her in animated conversation or corporeal engagement, but instead she seemed to find pleasure in polishing, arranging, wiping, and measuring distances between table settings, as though there was an achievable perfection somewhere in the universe, and that she had to keep searching for ways to bring the dining room into alignment therewith. But she also seemed to alternately glow and then fade, to work and then disappear, as though there was something much more important to do elsewhere, in some undefined and probably undiscovered space in the multitude of galaxies with which she had celestial relations.
    Jude would often look up from his scribbles to examine Tina, the source of his ethereal obsession, as though each glance at her might reinvigorate his imagination. She occupied him, literally, and her image lay deep within his fantasy world. For him, she offered evidence of human perfectibility, which was reflected in her mannerisms, in the geometrical shape of her bobby-pin-supported hairdo, in the carefully pressed crease in her short, black skirt, in the consciously arranged folds of her puffy, white, short-sleeved blouse, in her perfectly egg-shaped breasts, in her neatly plucked eyebrows, in her polished, eggshell skin, and in her near-black, almost-Asian eyes.
    Jude was incapable of imagining what she had been like as a young girl, and where she might have come from before assuming domination of this pristine dining room. Was she the envy of her friends, or the darling? Perhaps she was the model of what they had hoped to be in some near-future world: a gentle, beautiful, but powerful force, able to put order into a universe of chaos. It would certainly be ironic if that turned out to be the case, because Tina now fusses