Morning Tea

I wrote this for my creative writing class last week, my first fiction piece ever. Flash fiction. It's slightly morbid. I apologize to those of you with weak stomachs.

A hard, wooden chair cut into my back like razorblades, bruising the protruding disks of my vertebrates. I sat with my knees curled into my abdomen and for precisely twenty-three minutes I watched the violet shadows disintegrate into pale sunlight like an embryo escaping the womb. Sweat swirled from my tiny teacup and whisked itself into the cavities of my nostrils. It was then that my grandmother, aged ninety-eight years, interrupted the still morning. Her face was made of endless layers of skin, thin and transparent like a decaying peach slice. She made her way to the counter to pour herself a cup of tea. The splintered marrow in her hands caused her to drop the teapot, a Blue Willow china set from my mother’s first anniversary. I began to cry. Her nimble legs stooped down to pick up the shattered pieces of blue and ivory petals. I dripped from my chair and puddled around my grandmother. I stroked her hollow cheek and smiled at her to reassure her that everything was okay. She flinched away from me, cracking her skull against the corner of the counter; a tiny stream of blood trickled down her forehead and dripped onto a fragment of the teapot. 

I stared down at her limp chest and embraced the stillness of the room. I sauntered back to the kitchen chair facing the window and gripped my warm tea. It was lukewarm now. My fingers were sticky like maple syrup. I glanced at my grandmother again, her limbs looked like a paper doll chain, the ones my mother use to help me slice ribbon for to hang in the windowsill of the reading room. I held a large shard of Blue Willow in my palm and remembered how easy her skin was to slice through, like aged paper. A pool of blood seeped into the floorboards, it was the color of gingerbread tea. I decided to steep that for the afternoon.