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


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.

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9 Comments

  1. Great story Erin, especially since I’m a tea drinker. I love you could work that into such a sweet fantasy.

  2. Kathleen Hammond

    Lovely tie-in. Have you thought of collecting all you flashes for some type of revenue?
    Just asking.

    • Thank you!

      Actually, yes. I’m slowly adding to a book with the working title 101 Little Flash Pieces. Yes, the titles’s a bit redundant, as flash is little by nature. I think I’m about a third of the way done.

  3. Kathleen Hammond

    I made sure I put the ‘r’ in there. your. You know why.

  4. … ’tis true that the tea determines the dragon.

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