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allowed Jude to be in Fabergé Restaurant, despite his financial incompatibility with each and every one of the culinary masterpieces created therein, because John, with his incomprehensible grasp of precious oddities, felt strangely reassured when Jude was seen counting out his meager pennies in order to prolong his self-imposed captivity to the Fabergé Restaurant aura. And John knew that Jessica, the greatest of Earth’s creations, and the mother hen to his wind-torn nest, had now met Jude and spoken with him. And John knew that this encounter was but a preview of what would someday transpire in his great egg, just as the master jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé knew that his first creation for the czar, that hen egg, was but a precursor to the majesty, and the catastrophe, of that voluptuous empire.
     
    Deep within my very yolk I sense a day of impending endings and new beginnings, and as I watch them all enter into and depart from Fabergé Restaurant, my very body, I wonder at the role they’ll play therein. Jessica, oh Jessica, you will be first and foremost, despite the banality of a perfect soufflé and the imperfection of a lover’s insistent touch. Jude hopes for new beginnings, but is manacled to an imagination too weak at this early time in his young life to manifest in words or actions such lofty hopes. John knows, because John knows everything that is hatching inside of the Fabergé Restaurant, and with his gaze he sees all of what is past, passing, or to come, just as I feel it all as though it occurs within my very shell.

Chapter 4
    When Jessica completed her navigation of the white hallway leading to the screen door that separated the kitchen from the external shell of the egg, she emerged in a bright, neon-lit, stainless-steel and yellow-colored kitchen. This color choice was, of course, another one of John’s decisions. He had every non-stainless surface in his kitchen painted bright yellow, as a means of reminding his staff-turned-colleagues that this really was the Yolk of Fabergé Restaurant.
    As she moved from the dim light of the hallway to the inordinately illuminated Yolk, Jessica almost walked smack into Nate, who was on all fours with a dishwasher’s tray of cutlery, setting up some kind of contraption right in front of the prep table. She stopped to examine Nate’s creation of the day, a ritual of her work in the early hours of her evening shift. She examined this evening’s creation and realized that Nate had built a metallic pathway that led to a long, shiny, stainless trail of metal implements, which, although individually designed to dry pasta, were now steps upon a stairway, or, thought Jessica as she looked more carefully, the rungs of a ladder. In fact, Nate had created a long, metal ladder that led diagonally from the prep table all the way to the large sink, where pots were washed before and during suppertime shifts, a kind of yellow-brick road from a place of scouring to a place of cutting. Those who were new to the Yolk couldn’t have imagined the purposes of this evening ritual, couldn’t have dreamed that this tall, lanky, nerdy employee harbored twisted fantasies and preoccupations. Jessica, on the other hand, knew that every one of Nate’s obstacle courses, all of the Olympic-style events that he designed out of food-utensils, each and every one of his Bauhaus-inspired metallic creations, were designed for lobsters, whose eventual fate, like that of poor Agamemnon, was to die in a bathtub.
    Fabergé Restaurant’s lobsters weren’t killed by Clytemnestra who, in cahoots with her lover Aegisthus, son of Thyestes, threw a net over Agamemnon to prevent resistance—and then drowned him. No mythical end for the lobsters, regrettably. They were boiled to death in large cauldrons of bubbling water. Or they were bludgeoned by Johnny, the broiler chef, by being stabbed in the face before being cut in half, stuffed with a variety of different eggs, including lobster eggs (strangely),