Time for Tea

Time for Tea is a story that was published in Flash Fiction Magazine in 2017. The story follows a woman who has been pushed to her limits. I am proud to have this work as part of my portfolio, and I hope you enjoy it.


“You making me a cup of tea?” His voice rumbled in the distance. He was up and out of bed; she could hear his movements on the floorboards.

Stiff and inflexible, her hands ached in the mornings. Slowly, day by day, they were curling up, ready for death. She tried to rub some life back into the purpling fingertips and winced as she tried to navigate them through the small, ornate handle of the tea cup, lifting it carefully and slowly. She prayed silently to a God, who had long since forsaken her, that today would be the day she managed to prepare the tea before he made it to the kitchen. Her fingers trembled, and the sound of the tea cup clattering against the saucer pierced the heavy silence of the house.

“You’re like a bull in a bleedin’ china shop.” His voice thundered as he descended the stairs.

As she struggled to loosen the top of the jar, memories of her once long, delicate fingers caressing piano keys played in her mind like a fuzzy scene from a movie lost in the blanket of time.


“Married women have no time for piano,” he’d told her. Now the lines in her hands were deep-set, and a faded yellowing ring swiveled loosely just below her oversized knuckle. The only thing she recognized about these hands was her perfectly polished nails, painted in pillar-box red.

“You gone to the fucking tea plantation?” His voice was closer and pregnant with spite.

The kettle whistled, and she struggled to wield the pestle in the mortar. “Just bear with me a bit longer,” she whispered to her frozen, stubborn digits. The words were barely free from her lips before they evaporated, swallowed by the steam of the kettle.

Her own body was turning against her, and it wasn’t the first time. Every seed of a baby had refused to grow into something she could love. They came out stunted and deformed, like her hands were now. Shrivelled and leathery. Blue with death. He had told her that women were put on the earth to have babies, so his wife was cursed and useless. Every time he had come home stinking of perfume, his underpants crusty with dried semen that she was forced to wash, he asked her what she expected. He complained that he had ended up married to a “barren excuse of a woman.”

“How hard is it to make a cup of bleedin’ tea?” He was almost in the kitchen.

Reluctantly, her fingers unfurled enough to lift the kettle. She could have kissed them; maybe she would later, she thought. She poured the tea into the cup and set it down. Her breath quickened as her shaking hands emptied the contents of the mortar into the cup, just as his hunched frame blocked out the light from the doorway.

Her hands cooperated as she lifted the cup and saucer, and she smiled a genuine smile saying, “Your tea is ready darling, I’m coming.”