Friday Flash: Black Tea, no Dragon

Black Tea, No Dragon

Ginger tapped the measured tea leaves into the strainer and set it in the mouth of the pot. She hadn’t been able to afford the pricier Keemun Hao Ya tea leaves, but the plain Keemun would do. Plain! With its hints of plum and smoke, the mellowness of this tea was anything but plain. She only wished she had someone to share it with.

She’d been reading MacAvoy’s Tea With the Black Dragon again. It had been a disappointment the first time she read it, hoping for a lung dragon curled up in the San Francisco hotel, balancing a delicate cup in his hand and being careful to keep his whiskers out of his drink. Since then, she had come to love it and re-read it on an annual basis.

Still, she mused as she poured the just-boiling water over the leaves and set her timer, it would be nice to have a dragon drop by for tea, even if he did disguise himself as a human. She looked out the window into the garden and a wistful smile crossed her face as she watched George nibble at a rosebush. The unicorn would so like to know he still had company in the world.

– THE END –

204 words

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My blog is participating in the Forward Motion Flash Friday Blog Group, a weekly flash fiction exercise (not that I’m managing weekly!). Check out the other participating blogs for more flash.

Originally published at Erin M. Hartshorn. You can comment here or there.