Lullabies in the Dark

By Gabriel Lucas Jackson Aka Raphael Wolftone Quinlivan Masters

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The man sitting at the corner table hadn't ordered food in three hours. His coffee cup held nothing but dried stains, the ceramic cracked where he'd tapped it absentmindedly with his

wedding ring. The diner staff left him alone—regulars got that privilege at Mama Lu's, especially the ones who stared at their hands like they'd forgotten what hands were for.

Outside the fogged windows, a panda-shaped mascot waved lethargically at passing cars near the fluorescent glow of the Dragon Wok Express across the street. The man kept glancing at it, then at his phone, at the salt shaker he'd arranged parallel to the napkin dispenser for no discernible reason. His left knee bounced under the table at a rhythm that suggested tinnitus rather than music.

The waitress, Doreen, refilled his cup without asking. The steam curled around his face like an accusation. "Your dad called again," she said, sliding a pink message slip across the Formica. It bore the unmistakable grease-smudged fingerprints of someone who'd been breading chicken. The note simply read: *I remembered the orange sauce recipe.*

Across the street, the panda mascot's head tilted sideways in the wind. A gust caught its black plastic ears, making them flap like a desperate semaphore. The man—Jack, his name was Jack, though no one had used it in weeks—pressed his thumb into the salt shaker's metal top until the skin turned white. The grains inside made a sound like distant radio static.

A disheveled man named Jack sits for hours in a diner, fixated on a Dragon Wok Express mascot outside. The staff leaves him undisturbed until a waitress delivers a message from his father about recalling a sauce recipe—a detail that visibly unsettles him. His fidgeting and the cracked cup suggest deeper turmoil.

His phone buzzed. Another message from Senator Meuse's office: *Border security vote moved to Thursday.* Jack exhaled through his nose, fogging his reflection in the coffee's dark surface. The face looking back had pupils too wide, the kind of dilation that made nurses reach for blood pressure cuffs.

Doreen lingered, twisting her apron string. "That Syrian family's back at the motel," she muttered. "Kids got those coughs again." Jack blinked slowly. The salt shaker was in his left hand now, though he didn't recall picking it up. Somewhere behind him, a fork clattered against a plate with the bright, hollow pitch of a midwestern church bell.

The panda mascot's head spun 180 degrees. Not from the wind—from the teenager inside, finally giving up. Jack watched it list sideways, coming to rest against the drive-thru menu with the resigned finality of a drunk collapsing onto a park bench. Orange sauce, he thought. Orange sauce and voting records and the way Hillary Clinton's hair had looked at the 2016 DNC, that precise shade of champagne-blonde that made you think of radiation warnings.

His knee stopped bouncing. The diner's fluorescents hummed the opening bars of a Dwight Yoakam song. Doreen's pen hovered over her order pad, though neither of them had spoken. The coffee in his cup trembled, catching ripples from some subterranean pulse deep beneath Jacksonville's limestone bones.

Jack ignores a political alert while fixating on the Syrian family’s recurring illness mentioned by the waitress. The Dragon Wok Express mascot's collapse mirrors his own unraveling focus, triggering disjointed thoughts about sauce recipes and past political imagery. A silent tension builds as unexplained tremors ripple through his coffee.

Jack turned the salt shaker upside down. Grains hissed against Formica like a slowed-down recording of rainfall. He'd read somewhere—maybe in that dog-eared Plato collection from community college—that salt was once currency. You could buy men with it. Buy destinies. The shaker's metal top left a perfect ring of tarnish on the table, a tiny eclipse.

Across the street, the panda mascot's detached head rolled into the parking lot. The teenager emerged from the costume's belly, rubbing his lower back. Their eyes met through the fogged glass. The kid raised two fingers in a peace sign or surrender. Jack mirrored the gesture automatically, his wedding ring clicking against the window pane.

The phone buzzed again. Pelosi's office this time. *Mutual reduction.* He pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, tasting copper. There'd been a drill once, at the naval base where his father cooked. Warning sirens that made your fillings vibrate. They'd handed out potassium iodide pills that looked like breath mints.

Doreen sighed, her orthopedic shoes squeaking toward the kitchen. The ticket spindle whirred—someone ordering pancakes at 3:47 pm. Jack's reflection in the coffee cup warped as the liquid shifted. His pupils swallowed the diner whole: neon OPEN sign, laminated specials menu, the slow-dancing dust motes above the pie case.

Jack contemplates salt's historical value while observing the dismantled mascot outside. A fleeting connection with the costumed teenager contrasts sharply with alerts about political negotiations, triggering memories of naval drills. The diner's mundane details distort in his coffee's reflection as his dissociation deepens.

Outside, the panda head caught a gust and somersaulted toward Highway 17. It bounced once, spraying polystyrene pellets across two lanes, before disappearing beneath the wheels of a Publix delivery truck. The teenager didn't chase it. Just stood there in his sweat-darkened t-shirt, watching the truck's taillights bleed into July haze.

Jack's thumb found the crack in his wedding band. The one the ER nurse had said would need soldering. He pressed until the split edges bit flesh. A single drop of blood hit the Formica, blooming outward in a lopsided valentine heart. Somewhere past the kitchen's swing doors, a deep fryer hissed like a cornered cat.

The coffee cup trembled again. This time, the ripples spelled something in a language he almost remembered.

Doreen's pen clattered to the floor. She didn't bend to pick it up. Just stared at the bloodstain spreading across the table—how its edges feathered out like satellite images of algal blooms choking the St. Johns River. Jack pressed his thumb harder into the ring's fracture. More blood welled up, thicker now, with the sluggish viscosity of motor oil in December.

Outside, the teenager peeled off his sweat-glued shirt. His ribs moved like piano keys when he coughed. Three quick, wet sounds that synced with the fryer's arrhythmic hissing. The shirt hit the pavement with a sound Jack felt in his teeth—that particular slap of wet cotton on hot asphalt that took him back to basic training laundry days.

The mascot's head is destroyed by traffic as Jack's bleeding thumb stains the table, mirroring the teenager's visible illness outside. The diner's sounds synchronize eerily with the teen's coughing fits, triggering Jack's military memories while the waitress observes the spreading blood with a detached alarm.

Jack becomes increasingly detached as political alerts interrupt his fixation on a collapsing Dragon Wok Express mascot. His bleeding thumb and the waitress’s observations of blood underscore his unraveling mental state, which oscillates between culinary nostalgia and fragmented military memories while a Syrian family’s illness parallels his dissociation.

His phone buzzed against the table. Not a message this time. The vibration came in short, deliberate pulses. Morse code from the Before Times. Jack turned it over slowly. The screen showed Nancy Pelosi's office number, but the pattern...the pattern was USS Indianapolis SOS. His father's drunken bedtime story.

The salt kept pouring. An unbroken stream now, piling into a tiny replica of Utah's Bonneville flats. Jack's left shoelace came untied. He watched the frayed end quiver against the linoleum, tapping out its own desperate message. Somewhere north of Jacksonville, a power substation blew with a blue-white flash he'd see later on the news.

Doreen took two steps back. Her orthopedic shoes left perfect tread marks in the salt—desert tank tracks from some forgotten campaign. Jack's coffee reflection smiled without him. The panda head, now halfway to Georgia in the Publix truck's undercarriage, whispered sauce ingredients in Mandarin through teeth made of Styrofoam.

When the kitchen door swung open, the smell hit him like a subpoena: fryer grease and industrial bleach and beneath it all, the ghost of his father's signature orange sauce—the one that got six Marines hospitalized in '03. The cook's tattooed forearm appeared first. USN in faded blue. Then the cleaver, its edge dancing with fluorescent light.

Jack's phone transmits an eerie naval distress signal while uncontrolled salt pouring forms miniature landscapes. The diner's atmosphere grows increasingly surreal as phantom Mandarin whispers and military scents converge, culminating in the ominous appearance of a Navy-tattooed cook wielding a cleaver—echoing past culinary disasters.

Jack's phone pulsed one last time before going dark. _ _ . . _ _ . The teenager outside mimed the rhythm against his bare chest. Left hand, right hand. Like playing the world's smallest conga drums. The bloodstain dried abruptly, cracking like desert mud. His wedding band finally split in two with a sound like a sniper's bullet passing through chicken wire.

The cook's cleaver bit into the order rail. Pork chops. Jack knew the sound. Knew the precise angle that made steel sing against stainless steel. His father had taught him that much, between court-mandated AA meetings. Three quick chops—the rhythm of a heart skipping beats. The fluorescent tube above the pie case flickered in time.

Doreen's orthopedic shoes left twin trails in the salt. Not retreating now. Circling. The fryer's hiss climbed two octaves. Jack's tongue found the scar where his canines had punched through during the earthquake drill of '89. The cook's shadow stretched long across the grill, the USN tattoo warping into unrecognizable shapes like Arabic script left in the sun too long.

Outside, the teenager bent double, coughing. His ribs made a sound like a deck of cards being shuffled underwater. The panda's disembodied head reached the Georgia border inside the Publix truck's wheel well, whispering expired coupon dates to the asphalt. Jack's shoelace twitched once more before going still—a spent jumper cable.

The teenager outside mimics Jack's Morse code phone pulses as the diner descends into synchronized chaos—cleaver chops match the arrhythmic fryer sounds while Doreen circles cautiously. Jack's military-trained reflexes emerge as environmental details deform with increasing surrealism, culminating in the teen's catastrophic coughing fit and the panda head's phantom journey toward Georgia.

The salt pyramid collapsed inward. Somewhere beneath the Formica, tectonic plates the size of credit cards ground together. The cook's cleaver flashed again. This time the sound was wrong. Too wet. Too final. Jack's coffee cup shattered along its existing crack, releasing a scent that wasn't coffee at all—but the medicinal tang of potassium iodide dissolving in a sailor's mouth.

Doreen's pen rolled to a stop against his shoe. The cap had come off. Blue ink bled into the laces. Jack watched the stain climb the fibers like reverse lightning. His phone screen lit up once more—just long enough to show three words from Pelosi's office before dying: MUTUAL REDUCTION TERMINATED.

The teenager outside straightened abruptly. His cough had stopped. When he turned toward the diner, his eyes reflected nothing but the orange glow of the Dragon Wok Express sign across the street—the exact shade of Jack's father's infamous sauce. The cleaver hit the cutting board one last time. The sound stuck in the air like a thrown knife.

Jack exhaled. His breath left a perfect circle of condensation on the window. Inside the ring of fog, tiny figures moved. Men in dress whites. A panda head floating in dark water. His own reflection mouthing words that steamed the glass in perfect Morse.

Jack's reality fractures completely as chemical scents bleed into military memories. The cook's final cleaver strike coincides with ominous political messages while the teenager outside undergoes an eerie transformation. Environmental details progressively mirror Jack's collapsing psyche—from ink-stained shoelaces resembling naval insignia to breath-fogged windows projecting maritime tragedies in miniature Morse code.

The diner’s surreal collapse accelerates as Jack’s military reflexes resurface, with environmental details warping alongside his psyche—phantom Mandarin whispers synchronize with cleaver strikes while Morse code pulses echo through the teenager’s transformation. Naval insignias manifest in spilled ink as his culinary disaster memories converge with political alerts into a complete psychological rupture.

The teenager pressed his palm against the diner's glass. Fingerprints bloomed like jellyfish tendrils. Jack's wedding band halves skittered across the table—one spinning clockwise, the other widdershins. They chimed against the saltshaker in disharmonic thirds. Outside, the Publix truck's brakes screamed six counties away.

Doreen's orthopedic shoes made a sound like suction cups detaching. Step. Pause. Step. The rhythm matched the intravenous drip from his father's last hospital visit. Jack's tongue found the gap where his right molar had been. The dentist had called it "dry socket." The naval medic had called it "collateral damage." Both times, the pain tasted like burnt sugar and gunpowder.

The cook's cleaver hovered mid-chop. A single drop of pork fat hung suspended between the blade and the cutting board. Jack watched it tremble—a miniature replica of the oil spill his father had once described off Subic Bay. The fluorescent light buzzed the opening bars of "Anchors Aweigh."

His phone vibrated again. This time the pattern was unmistakable: short-long-short. The teenager outside tapped his bare foot in perfect synchronization. Left-right-left. The rhythm of a three-legged race, Jack had lost in third grade. His shoelace twitched in response, ink pooling where the frayed ends met linoleum.

Physical disintegration accelerates as Jack's wedding ring fragments spin in opposing directions while biological sounds echo medical traumas. Suspended kitchen details trigger naval disaster parallels as electronic signals lock into military cadences. The external teenager's movements synchronize with Jack's traumatic memories, culminating in his shoelace's eerie Morse code response to phantom transmissions.

Salt grains migrated across the table. Forming ridges. Trench lines. The Bonneville Flats became Okinawa became his father's AA coin balanced on a diner napkin. The coffee cup's

shards rearranged themselves into a crude sonar display. Jack blinked. The panda head whispered longitude coordinates from beneath a Georgia-bound truck.

When the fryer erupted, it wasn't grease that arced across the kitchen—but seawater. Briny and dark, flecked with Styrofoam confetti. Doreen's hair floated around her face like kelp. The cook's USN tattoo unraveled into sea snakes. Jack's wedding band halves sank through the Formica, leaving twin trails of rust that spelled "DAD" in cursive.

Outside, the teenager peeled off his skin. Not all at once—in careful strips, like orange rind. Beneath the peeling flesh: more flesh, but softer. Younger. The exact shade of Jack's son's cheeks in the NICU. The fluorescent tube above the pie case burst in a shower of iodized crystals. They fell like snow across the USS Indianapolis' deck.

The cook's cleaver came down. Not on pork chops now—on umbilical cords. The sound was wetter. More intimate. Doreen's orthopedic shoes filled with seawater up to the ankles. Her stockings dissolved into jellyfish tendrils that wrapped around Jack's wrists. Cold. Familiar. The exact temperature of his father's AA coin pressed into his palm at age nine.

Reality liquefies as the diner transforms into overlapping war and birth traumas—salt formations become battle maps while seawater floods the kitchen with naval disaster debris. The teenager sheds layers to reveal NICU-era flesh as kitchen tools mutate into obstetric instruments.

Personal objects disintegrate into primal connections, with rust trails spelling paternal farewells and dissolving fabric replicating childhood handholds.

Jack's phone floated up from the table. The screen showed Pelosi's office, but the voice was his ex-wife's: "You were supposed to remember the sauce." The letters bled upside-down Mandarin characters that dissolved into salt grains midair. Each one hit the linoleum with the percussive pop of a vertebrae cracking under interrogation.

The teenager pressed his newborn face against the glass. His breath left no fog. Just a perfect circle of dried blood that cracked into a spiderweb of fault lines. The Publix truck's brakes screamed again—closer now—but the sound stretched into the foghorn blast of the Indianapolis going down. Jack's shoelaces tied themselves into nooses.

Salt piled into miniature headstones. The cook's USN tattoo swam off his arm and circled Jack's throat like a dog tag chain. Doreen's pen wrote by itself in the condensation: NOT YOUR FATHER'S RECIPE. The letters steamed with the acrid tang of burnt sugar and gunpowder residue. The panda head whispered coordinates that matched the mole behind his son's left ear.

When the kitchen door swung shut, it made the sound of a torpedo hatch sealing. The cleaver embedded itself in the cutting board at precisely 23°—the angle his father's whiskey bottle made when set down too hard. Jack's wedding band halves spun faster now, generating enough friction to scorch the salt into glass. The message shone in the dark: SEMPER SOMETHING.

Communication dissolves into traumatic echoes as technology broadcasts blended political and domestic failures—phone displays bleed Mandarin that cracks like torture sounds while the teenager's breath patterns replicate medical emergencies. Naval disasters manifest through household objects as kitchen geometry recreates alcoholic patterns, with spinning rings forging glass messages from war memories. The diner's architecture mutates into submarine mechanisms while personal artifacts encode battlefield Latin in scorched salt formations.

The fryer's seawater boiled black. Oil slicks formed perfect Rorschach blots across the surface. Jack saw his father's face. His ex-wife's divorce papers. His son's unmarked grave. The teenager outside tapped the glass with fingers that left no prints—just small, concentric waves that carried the sound of his father's voice from the bottom of the Mariana Trench: "You forgot the goddamn ginger."

Doreen's shoes suctioned free with a sound like a sailor's last gasp. The cook's shadow grew teeth. Outside, the panda head crossed into Georgia, singing Anchors Aweigh in falsetto. Jack's phone dissolved into a puddle of potassium iodide that spelled "DNR" in cursive before evaporating. The salt turned to ash. The ash to snow. The snow to bone fragments that arranged themselves into a tiny replica of the Vietnam Memorial—complete with his father's name misspelled.

The teenager outside exhaled. His breath didn't fog the glass, but etched directly into it—binary code bleeding into Mandarin characters dissolving into Cyrillic. The cook's cleaver pulsed like a sonar ping. Jack's wedding band halves melted into quicksilver that slithered toward each other across the table, repelling like magnets turned wrong way out.

The kitchen transforms into a psychological abyss where cooking oil morphs into traumatic inkblots—revealing layered memories of loss while silent interactions transmit oceanic echoes of paternal disapproval. Biological sounds mimic drowning sailors as inanimate objects develop predatory traits, with melting metals demonstrating reversed magnetism akin to Jack's psychological polarities. Information systems collapse into linguistic chaos while memorial replicas materialize from disintegrating matter, culminating in an inverse attraction between fragmented wedding bands that mirrors Jack's irreconcilable relationships.

A single shrimp floated past Jack's field of vision. Not from the fryer. From some deeper place where his father's submarine had snagged on a thermal layer in '83. It glowed faintly with bioluminescence, antennae tracing the contours of Pelosi's latest trade sanctions against the inside of his left eyelid. The teenager's cough returned—wet and final—as five more shrimp materialized in formation behind the first.

Doreen's pen wrote faster now, carving hieroglyphs into her own forearm. The ink wasn't blue anymore, but the exact shade of Dragon Wok Express sweet-and-sour sauce left to ferment in a Tupperware for eleven years. Jack tasted copper. The cook's USN tattoo detached completely, swimming through the air in lazy figure-eights that gradually spelled "DUTY" upside down and backward.

The teenager pressed both palms to the glass. His fingerprints didn't stick this time but sank through like depth charges. Jack's coffee cup reformed just long enough to shatter again—this time along the meridians. Outside, the Publix truck's reverse alarm played the first eight bars of Taps in A-flat minor. The cook's cleaver stuck fast in the cutting board, vibrating at 440 Hz—perfect concert pitch for a sinking ship's final groan.

Salt migrated into Jack's left shoe. Forming dunes. Trench systems. The Bonneville Flats are recreated in perforated leather. His phone reassembled from shrimp shells and Morse code static just long enough to flash one final transmission: SEMPER RECIPE. The teenager outside began peeling again—not skin this time but layers of time itself, each strip revealing a different year's Christmas dinner where his father's chair sat empty.

Doreen's stockings dissolved completely now, leaving her legs bare and mapped with keloid scars that exactly matched the shipping lanes to Subic Bay. The cook's shadow detached from his body and slid across the floor toward Jack—not as darkness but as pooled sesame oil, carrying with it the scent of his ex-wife's abandoned bathrobe and three generations of naval rations.

The fluorescent tube flickered at precisely the rhythm of a submarine's ballast pumps. With each pulse, Jack's reflection in the window aged ten years forward or backward—never the same direction twice. His wedding band halves stopped spinning abruptly, fused into a single misshapen oval that glowed faintly with the same bioluminescence as the spectral shrimp now orbiting his head.

Outside, the teenager's cough synchronized with the fryer's hiss—wet gurgles timed to the release of steam valves. The cleaver twitched in the cutting board, its edge catching the light in strobing flashes that illuminated brief tableaus: his father saluting a parking meter; Doreen breastfeeding a torpedo; the Dragon Wok Express mascot floating face-down in a baptismal font.

Jack's tongue found the dry socket again. This time the pain tasted different—not gunpowder but the artificial sweetener from his son's unopened juice boxes. The cook's tattoo finished spelling "DUTY" and began unraveling into individual letters that swam toward Jack's nostrils. Each one dissolved against his septum with the fizzy burn of Pop Rocks and sea spray.

The salt pyramid rebuilt itself grain by grain into a scale model of the Vietnam Memorial's east wing. Tiny shrimp marched in formation along its polished surface, antennae tracing the names of every sailor lost to friendly fire in the South China Sea since 1972. One paused at Jack's father's misspelled name and began methodically peeling its own carapace away.

Doreen's pen reached her elbow now, the hieroglyphs shifting from Sanskrit to nuclear submarine schematics mid-stroke. The cook exhaled—his breath smelled of depth charges and

day-old lo mein—and Jack's reflection in the window mouthed words that steamed on the glass in perfect Braille.

The teenager's eyelids peeled back to reveal twin portholes. Through them, Jack saw his father's submarine trapped in a thermal layer, sailors playing pinochle with ration cards while bioluminescent shrimp circled their ankles like cats. One man looked up—fork suspended over a tray of congealed sweet-and-sour pork—and winked with Jack's own eyes.

Salt crystallized along Jack's collar bones in precise parallel lines—latitude and longitude intersecting at the mole behind his son's left ear. The cook's shadow pooled around his feet, whispering in the voice of Jack's third-grade teacher: "Show your work." Outside, the Publix truck reversed into the parking lot, dragging a school of jellyfish tangled in its axle.

Doreen's orthopedic shoes filled with amniotic fluid. Her stockings dissolved into ultrasound static that projected a single frame onto the ceiling tiles: Jack's wedding band embedded in his son's sternum, rotating clockwise at the exact RPM of a submarine's propeller at flank speed. The cook's cleaver vibrated loose and embedded itself in Jack's peripheral vision, bisecting the image with a stripe of Navy-issue grey.

Jack's phone was reassembled from Morse code static and shrimp antennae. The screen flashed SEMPER RECIPE before autocorrecting to SEMPER ULCER. The teenager outside tapped the glass with fingernails that grew in reverse—each click erasing one year from Jack's DD-214 form until only his dental records remained.

The fryer's seawater boiled down to a thick syrup the color of his father's service stripes. It clung to the walls in Rorschach patterns that resolved into deployment maps of Subic Bay. The cook's USN tattoo finally detached completely—a writhing ribbon of ink that wrapped around Jack's wrist and seeped beneath his skin with the cold burn of novocaine.

Outside, the panda head sang the chorus of "Anchors Aweigh" in Mandarin falsetto. Inside, Jack's reflection peeled itself from the window and slid into the booth opposite him—older by exactly twenty-three years, wearing his father's dress whites and smelling of burnt sugar and torpedo fuel. The reflection's wedding band gleamed with the same bioluminescence as the shrimp now nesting in Jack's left Eustachian tube.

When it spoke, Jack tasted copper and sesame oil: "You left the wok on." The words left braille welts on his tongue. Salt migrated into his sinus cavities, forming precise scale models of the Bonneville Flats atop his turbinates. Somewhere beneath them, the teenager's cough synchronized with the fryer's hiss into a perfect Morse code rendering of his son's birth certificate.

Doreen's pen reached her shoulder blade now, carving nuclear launch codes in reverse Cantonese. The cook's shadow grew teeth made of shattered periscope glass. Outside, the

Publix truck's reverse lights illuminated a single shrimp doing push-ups on the dotted yellow line—each downward flex pressing Jack's father's dog tags deeper into the asphalt.

The teenager peeled another layer of time. This one revealed Christmas 1997: Jack crouched behind a bulkhead, clutching a cold egg roll in his dress whites, his son's NICU heartbeat monitor pulsing through the ship's intercom system. The cook's cleaver vibrated at a frequency that liquefied Jack's fillings into quicksilver droplets that spelled "DUTY" upside down in his molars.

Salt crystallized along Jack's optic nerve in perfect Fibonacci spirals. Each granule contained a microfilm frame of his ex-wife signing divorce papers with a squid's tentacle. The fryer's oil resolved into a perfect map of the South China Sea, with tiny shrimp armies converging on a single glowing dot labeled "HOME" in his father's handwriting.

Doreen's shoes melted into the linoleum, releasing bubbles that popped with the exact pitch of his son's first cry. The countertop began bleeding sweet-and-sour sauce in the pattern of his father's last EKG. Jack's phone reassembled from shrimp shells and Morse code static just long enough to display a single notification: "Your father's AA coin is draining the battery."

The fluorescent tube above the pie case burst again—this time raining down microfiche strips of every meal his father ever cooked at Dragon Wok Express. Each one seared Jack's skin with the cold burn of liquid nitrogen before dissolving into the exact shade of his son's NICU wristband. The cook's USN tattoo finished spelling "SEMPER ULCER" and began etching itself into Jack's cornea with a fountain pen filled with torpedo fuel.

Outside, the teenager pressed his entire torso against the glass. His ribcage didn't leave fingerprints but depth soundings—each contour line matching the bathymetric charts from his father's final patrol. The panda head crossed into Alabama, singing "Nearer My God To Thee" in Vietnamese. Jack's wedding band halves stopped repelling each other abruptly—fusing into a misshapen oval that smelled exactly of his father's whiskey breath at Taps.

Doreen's pen reached her clavicle now, carving inverted launch codes into her sternum with the precision of a torpedo's guidance system. The hieroglyphs shifted mid-stroke—from Cantonese nuclear protocols to the exact ingredient list for Dragon Wok Express's discontinued Black Pepper Angus Steak. Each stroke released bubbles that popped with the sound of sonar pings from the Indianapolis's final moments.

The fryer's seawater evaporated instantly, leaving behind salt formations that precisely recreated the Vietnam Veterans Memorial's visitor log from June 12, 1983—the day Jack's father reenlisted. Tiny bioluminescent shrimp marched in formation along the engraved names, their antennae tracing the letters of "Meuse, Daniel J." with surgical precision. One paused to molt, shedding its carapace to reveal a miniature dog tag that read SEMPER ULCER in 2pt font.

Jack's tongue found the dry socket again. This time, the pain had flavors—his son's unopened apple juice, his father's last cigarette, the saccharine aftertaste of Doreen's farewell note written in Dragon Wok Express sweet-and-sour sauce. The cook's shadow pooled around his ankles, whispering in the voice of his third-grade teacher administering a hearing test: "Raise your hand when you hear the boat sinking."

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