The Old Lady and the Teakettle

There was the clank of metal meeting metal, and a brief hiss of gas before ignition, quickly resigning itself to burn a bright blue, albeit in a silenter state. Ruxandra, face defined by the deep crevasses life had left upon her, sucked in her lips as she begun the preparations for her afternoon cup of tea. She pulled the tin from the windowsill, looking into the sunlit garden, and prised open the lid with a soft grunt. She spared a moment to admire her garden, the garden she had worked hours in throughout her life, maintaining all sorts of wonderful flora, each plant picked as much for its vibrancy and appeal as its practical uses. She measured out a spoon and a half of tea leaves and dropped it into her cup, replacing the tin on the windowsill and turning back with a cloth in her hand to the teakettle, which was almost at the perfect heat. She waited several moments more for it to reach a higher temperature, and then killed the gas supply as she grasped the handle with the cloth. She had intended to then make her tea, but something altogether different happened. There was a small flash of rainbow, like a firework, and a rushing of wind and Ruxandra was gone. The teakettle steamed lazily upon the stove.

Some how, by forces not yet clear, she had become infused with the vapours of the tea, and being of a somewhat more frail mass than the liquid within, became quickly distilled into smoky swirled droplets of a tea like substance. As her essence gradually beaded up, and rolled down the hot insides of the kettle, she thoughly mixed into the tea itself. Alas as no one was around to take her from the fire…she began to re vaporise…and wafted up out of the spout, and drifted off into the wind… (Story branch)From Ruxandras perspective, her eyes suddenly envisioned billions of teeming lifeforms, busying themselves across her field of vision. And in the time it took for her mind to decide to call them microbes, she suddenly realised that they all had human faces; and happy ones at that. She also, having had her judgment skewed by this peculiarity, came to the likely conclusion that she was upside down. “How will I drink my tea?” was the first string of recognisable inner monologe that sprung to mind but the microbes simply laughed at her.
A blossoming of orange eminated from their laughter and she suddenly felt the right way up again, staring at her boiling water without a microbe in sight. But a single tea bag of orange rooibos tea hung swinging from her cupboard door in an innanimately hypnotic way.

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