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  Hatched

  Robert F. Barsky

  Mechanicsburg, PA USA

  Published by Sunbury Press, Inc.

  105 South Market Street

  Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania 17055

  www.sunburypress.com

  NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Robert F. Barsky.

  Cover Copyright © 2016 by Sunbury Press, Inc.

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  ISBN: 978-1-62006-740-6 (Trade Paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-62006-741-3 (Mobipocket)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944956

  FIRST SUNBURY PRESS EDITION: August 2016

  Product of the United States of America

  0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55

  Set in Bookman Old Style

  Designed by Crystal Devine

  Cover by Amber Rendon

  Edited by Janice Rhayem

  Continue the Enlightenment!

  All of the events in this story are fictional.

  That is, all of the events recounted in this story were like eggs,

  and all of these eggs were incubated under conditions sufficiently ideal

  as to lead them to hatch, and then once hatched,

  they were placed in a cauldron lined with warm butter,

  and then they were combined, seasoned, heated, and, finally, served.

  To you.

  The resulting eggy mixtures are artifices of truth,

  they are snippets, lifted from known sources and then distorted,

  they are fake fantasies, incorrectly recalled, and then transcribed,

  and they are not, really, real.

  But like all fictional, partial reminiscences that have been aesthetically rendered,

  and like all of those sensations that emerge from our imbibing concocted recipes,

  they are delicious.

  And they are all also true.

  Chapter 1

  Immaculate imperfection. Silent to the touch, but teeming with all of the potential that can be excited by fertile stimulation. From up close, it seems painted with an imperfectly mixed, white gouache upon an uneven surface; from further back, it is an oblong globe, steadied from the center to the periphery to withstand the gentle swaying of the nest, the wind, the rain. The shell is solid, protective, and yet, always, and secretly, vulnerable. It’s hardy and well-insulated inside, but once expelled into the world of knocks and piercings, the yolk suffers and thereby reveals the single weakness of a shell pervious to rigid surfaces, its soft and mottled form suddenly blistered, cracked, dented, revealing tender, white flesh within, but concealing a core, an essence, a willing soul now and forever unfulfilled. Never to consume, the yolk now settles, haughtily, awaiting the fate of consumption. . . .

  Suddenly, its very essence is reminiscent of Sunday morning, when Dad would for once sleep in and, that accomplished, would awaken the household with ‘Rise and shine!,’ accompanied by the sizzling sound of butter caressing and then solidifying the gooey translucence into white, the bulbous yellow to a globe and a world unto itself. The buttery pan, once heated, makes golden magic of this bulging, yellow world, now perched atop a gooey throne that, from the end towards the center, grows into a plastic base. The battered shells now ruthlessly discarded reveal untarnished and impeccable interiors, smooth walls now dripping with the liquid white remains, having for their trouble preserved the yellow center of the world, bulging, nearly heaving, now intact, defying gravity’s pull and begging. . . .

  “Would you like another one?”

  “What? Oh!” Jude, startled into submission and then into feigned aggression, looked up, almost violently, and was thus transported from a state of transfixion to one of planned aggression, and then bewitchment. Vulnerable through his heightened senses, he was shocked into the world by eyes, green, oscillating side to side, shining. Suddenly still, they drew him in, glistening.

  He blinks.

  Sparkles of light now capture his gaze, a regard that had been so long focused upon the paper in front of him, and, moreover, on the shining, white egg in his hand, and, intermittently, upon the shards of a second eggshell that was splattered out before him.

  It took him a moment to realize that she was speaking to him, and he let his eyes drift down to her lips. Now they were frozen in a kind of grimace. They had been stilled by his silence.

  “I’m sorry . . .?”

  “Did you want another egg? I don’t want to . . .”

  Jude’s stare descended, rose up, and then expanded outwards, his perspective now encompassing the features of the woman who stood before him. He felt thunderstruck, as though he’d been the only person in the universe to that point, and was now confronted not only with another being, but one who had chosen him, of all other life forms, with whom to interact. For this reason, and at that moment, he felt bonded to this woman, attracted, as a celestial body is to a moon that suddenly finds itself spinning within the powerful gravitational draw of a greater being. One moment longer, and his eyes might never again close. He felt his own stare burning and pulsating, as though his very eyeballs stood on the threshold of ossifying that moment for all eternity.

  The woman who stood before Jude, on the other hand, squinted her eyes with impending despair and sensed that familiar flush of fear in her heart, a kind of sickening anxiety that sets in upon the realization that this person, with whom she herself had chosen to interact, might be a psychopath.

  “Do I?” stammered Jude. The woman before him looked impatient.

  “Oh!” Jude blurted out. “No, no, thanks, I just needed the one, um, the two of them. I’m . . . I’m done, thanks.” He looked down at the perfect, white egg that nestled into one hand, and then to the messy remnants of the other that he’d destroyed through his exploration. He looked back up into her eyes, but they were frowning and piercing.

  “Sorry, I think I dripped a little on the table cloth, I mean it dripped, um, dropped from the shell.”

  She feigned a smile, but remained hovering precariously between a sense of security in the idea that he was just weird, and a sense of profound horror at the thought that this bizarre behavior might be but a symptom of some repulsive comportment to come. An hour or so ago she had first given him one egg, which he went on to crack and fondle and finally destroy, and then a second, as he had requested, that he simply stared at as though it were the decryption device for some long-lost code. At the time, it seemed a quaint and possibly appropriate thing to do in a restaurant in which the entire menu is oriented towards eggs of all kinds, and in which clients are accustomed to asking for them, in various forms.

  But when he requested that second egg, and proceeded to stare at it, to caress it, to seek some kind of message from it, and then to write frantically in the
wake of his observations, she concluded that she’d done the wrong thing, with the wrong objects, to the wrong person, at the wrong time, in her place of employment. She also felt that somehow she was destined to suffer, for eternity, on account of that flippant decision. Her life seemed to now hang in the balance between survival and brutal destruction, between the suspended moment of their current interaction and every and all moments that would follow, until the end of time.

  In the meantime, Jude’s eyes lowered back down to her mouth, opened slightly, and her lips now spread before him. He could see her teeth, quietly aligned in harmonious formation, bared forth to his consuming gaze. The image of their white enamel joined at that moment the sight he had frozen in his mind of the eggshell, with which he’d awkwardly spent the last few minutes—or was it hours? And he was transported back to that space of calm, penetrating scrutiny. His eye stared forth relentlessly, and her teeth became droplets of petrified enamel, tiny, perfect replicas of that unbroken eggshell that had hovered a few inches from his face but a few moments before. He wondered, if he were to get closer to her smile, and to those perfect, white teeth, would he find the imperfections of the second, intact egg, with its mottled, cratered surface? Perhaps, he ruminated like a gaping dentist drugged with his own ether, her teeth, like the now-broken shell of the first egg, would reveal the wet idealism of the coated interior surface, glistening, smooth, aglow with the light above his table.

  As his passionate dream of symbiosis made claim to his reason, he awakened and looked at her as a person, an employee in this restaurant, a total stranger, and he realized that she looked not only exasperated, but also terrified. Was this the emotion he invoked in this human being? He looked down at her name, embroidered into her chef’s uniform, upon which was inscribed but one word: “Jessica.” He looked up at her, sheepishly. “Um, . . .” He tried to speak. No words came forth from his gaping mouth.

  Her frown returned, and intensified.

  Unfortunately, the awkwardness of the situation had rendered him mute. He thought to apologize to her, to Jessica. He imagined himself using her own name, clearly and calmly, so that she’d realize that he had respect for her, for her parents who had named her, and for the village from which she hearkened. But her body was no longer a fixed receptacle of his will; indeed, she was turning away from him, unwilling to sustain the obdurate silence.

  “Oh . . .!” Jude ejaculated a sound intended to fix her to a space near to him, but still, no words emerged, just a low-sounding vibration, like a grunt. He panicked, hoping that she hadn’t heard.

  Whether or not Jude’s primordial noise was audible above the sound of the pre-client restaurant, he’d never know. But Jessica’s sense of employee etiquette yoked her in, and she turned back to him. “Tina, um, the maître d’, told me that you are conducting experiments?”

  He looked at her attentively. She spoke with a degree of false, or at least forced, optimism, and as she did so, she looked down at his notebook, and saw that its first page was partially covered with untidy handwriting.

  “I am, yes,” replied Jude optimistically, casually noting a brilliant idea that emerged from her question: “Eggsperiments.”

  “We’re not used to bringing our ingredients to the table,” she said.

  He looked up from the page, suddenly panic-stricken, vulnerable, weak.

  “Um . . .!”

  Now she feigned a smile. She was looking for some rational explanation and had given him a small number of seconds to produce one before she found an excuse to get John, often referred to as John-the-Owner, who would happily arrive donning the baseball bat that he brought with him to the restaurant each day. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d asked him to come join her at a table for a little exercise in exiting disorderly clientele.

  Jude looked disparagingly forward in a near-normal pose, as though he had suddenly recognized his place at this table, in this restaurant, upon this planet. He also came to be aware of his awkward method of communication with her, with Jessica, an innocent victim of wages and tips and bonuses, a captive audience of his own facetiousness. As a consequence, the deranged look in his eyes wavered, softened, and dissolved, and he beamed forth a face of gentle innocence and naïve wanderlust.

  The effect upon Jessica was instantaneous.

  “He is probably just young, idealistic, and stupid,” she thought. Her expression softened, and she turned towards him, in complete deference. “It’s okay,” she conceded aloud, “I just want to make sure that you don’t need anything else.”

  He found some consolation in her kind reaction to his pathetic demeanor. “Thanks,” he murmured.

  She had crushed him, and he now lay before her like the quivering, gooey liquid of an uncooked egg white, separated from whatever meaning the yolk could provide when adjoined to it.

  “Thanks so much,” he proclaimed, offering total submission and gratitude.

  Jessica’s professional training was getting the best of her, at last, and in its wake came all of the formality, the stiffness, the routine, and the rhetoric of a job spent satisfying the needs, culinary and otherwise, of others.

  “If you do need another egg, you can have one, but I’m going on my break now. I guess you could ask Tina, the maître d’, she’s around here somewhere. . . .” She suddenly stopped her soliloquy, and felt as though she’d left her body and was now watching her own strange performance in front of this even stranger man. She realized that her look was one of perplexity, not on account of anything he had done or said, but because of the bizarre advice she had just given him regarding Tina.

  Now, she did turn to leave, and then suddenly turned back, as though she’d forgotten to convey a crucial detail.

  “Break!” she burst out as though struck by a singular revelation.

  Jude didn’t know whether to smile or flee.

  “Break! I’m on my break. Break. You know, I’m, well, broken, like the shell.”

  Jude was completely bewildered, and bewitched.

  “I have recovered,” she thought to herself. Then, with poised purpose, she turned away and headed towards the kitchen. She felt better, back in control. She was, after all, a self-possessed employee in the service industry, and, moreover, she was a pretty woman who was accustomed to being accosted by idiotic coworkers and clients. And so she decided that she could allow this particular client to entirely leave her mind, and that she could purge her memory of him, forever.

  “Thanks,” called Jude to her abiding absence.

  Jessica didn’t turn back.

  “I appreciate it!” he called out to the flip side of her existence. Now he had no idea whatsoever of what he should have said. He felt as though he’d shared in a really strange private joke related to, who knows? So now what? He was running out of time. Her essence was being drawn like a spirit receding to the other side of the universe.

  “I should get going, are you closing?” he called after her, rising instinctively. She did not respond, and he was left halfway to standing. He sat back down. How long had he been there? He looked down to his scrawl and added the word “break” to the adjacent “eggsperiments,” and then looked over at the check to see what he had ordered. “Eggs,” it said. Just one word hovered before his eyes. “Eggs,” and beside it: $14.50.

  How much tip could he afford? He motioned to his pocket to alleviate the client guilt, but her uniform indicated that she works in the kitchen, not the dining room.

  “Is it okay to tip those who work in the kitchen?” he wondered to himself. He looked down at his tabletop, a gleaming, white surface littered with the shells he had so carefully examined, and then smashed. He then carefully placed the still-intact egg on a small dish in front of him, with undue deliberation. He flicked his wrist with great determination, to position the face of his watch towards his overly attentive gaze. Noon.

  “Lunchtime,” he thought. “Wow, I’ve been here since 10:00 a.m., and all I have is this paragraph. And now she, Jessica, is going to kick
me out. Shit.” He realized that he had been speaking aloud and suddenly panicked. “I . . .,” he endeavored once again to call out in her direction. “Shit, she’s gone, and she’s, oh . . .” He reached down again towards his pocket to lure her back. “Who the fuck am I kidding?” he thought to himself, in a space that almost made him audible. He instinctively looked up in the direction of her departure.

  En route to the swinging doors that divided the restaurant from the kitchen, Jessica suddenly paused and directed her gaze towards the entrance to the restaurant, where a figure had appeared. She pulled off her white-linen chef’s hat, imploring a cascade of tawny hair to spill forth anxiously, and then careen downwards, almost to her waist, in apparent relief. Her face, her regard, the row of those beautiful, egg-like teeth, was lost to Jude’s view as she oriented her gate towards this dark figure.

  Jude felt a sense of abandonment and despair. He was shattered, like the eggy shards before him. He studied what remained in his view of this woman—Jessica. He was staring intently forward, mesmerized. “She is so beautiful.” He was speaking to his mind’s ear in a wistful, nostalgic tone, like a parent addressing the windshield of her car as she drove away from the summer camp where little Amy, or Sylvia or Freddy, would spend the next two anxiety-ridden weeks in estrangement and despair. He cautiously reviewed what remained of his interaction with her. Her white chef jacket was perhaps a bit shorter than the norm, arrested just slightly above her hips. Tight, black-and-white-mottled chef pants accentuated her beautiful form. He wondered if she was wearing standard kitchen garb, or if these garments were somehow special, perhaps tailored to fit her and her alone.