Free Hatched by Robert F. Barsky

that was going on behind the steel, swinging doors that led to the yolk, and to Jessica. For him, the restaurant was almost eerily quiet. By the time he arrived, the late lunchtime clients had, for the most part, disappeared, leaving the few and the privileged, those with the leisure of long conversations and others who had more furtive motives and surreptitious existences. There were bankers who, with their wives, were trying to undo what had been done in secret; investors who had retired hours early from the trading, dealing, stealing frenzy because of one sale sweet enough to warrant withdraw; executives who decided upon a “meeting” with feigned personages far from the office, after a decidedly ignoble morning of video games, or an awkward tryst with a secretary, colleague, owner, boss, or supplier, or, more ignoble yet, knees upon the carpet and sex in hand, themselves.
    Life, after all, just isn’t that glamorous.
    Jude surveyed the familiar egg setting. The meager expenditures he made there each day were adding up, exceeding all other expenses in his life, even his rent. As always, he entered Fabergé Restaurant timidly, looking for a quiet table where he wouldn’t be in the way of real customers or in close proximity to voices distinct enough to disturb his writing. The only exception to that rule was an as-yet unrealized glance of possibility from a searching eye, an I in search of a we for the purposes of mutual bliss. This possibility was entirely theoretical, because he’d never actually met a lover in a bar or a restaurant, no matter how interesting he feigned to look with his skateboard, his soiled jean jacket, his tussled hair, and the glaringly obvious lack of plans for any real work that day. In short, the bohemian writer look had yet to bear any fruit; it had not led to the hatching of any new trysts, and had not even stimulated much interest from the staff of Fabergé Restaurant. Or so he thought.
    The fact was, Jude’s look may have been appropriated in a grungy coffee shop on the West Coast, but he was decidedly a tad pathetic in a place that aspired to, and succeeded in, attracting the kinds of clients Fabergé Restaurant generally attracted. The exception to his casual attire, discernable only to the well initiated, was a very thick, black Montblanc cartridge pen, a gift from his aunt Doris. Five years ago she had paid a visit to his hometown. Jude happened to be there at the time, visiting his mother. Aunt Doris made contact with him, because she’d learned, from his mother, that he was aspiring to be a writer, and Aunt Doris loved the idea of having one such blessed soul in the family. She was the enlightened relative who, consciously emulating Madame Bovary, had read her way through sufficient romance novels to blur the line between her life of tedious marriage and her fantasy of endlessly passionate affairs with exotic men in fancy settings.
    It turned out that the fantasies that Aunt Doris had dreamed up were but castles in a darkening sky of impending old age, however, one day she just gave away that large, black pen. It had fulfilled a negative destiny, remaining exactly what it was: a large, black pen. In her fantasies, it was the powerful phallic symbol that would draw into her being a world of lust and seduction, as it had for so many writers, like those who’d flirt and find love in the Parisian quartier of St. Germain-des-Près early in the twentieth century. But Aunt Doris didn’t live in Paris, and she was not a writer, and her fantasies couldn’t change that. But maybe she could live through a relative who could wield it, and thereby find love vicariously?
    Jude carried the Montblanc everywhere, rendering it more an obligation than a weapon. In this respect, Jude did have a brush with legendary characters, because he, like Atlas, who had sided with the Titans in their war against the Olympians, was forced to stand at the western edge of Earth and support the entire sky upon his