The kettle whistled.
She burned.
Drops of hot tea scalded her shins, ankles and knees after the mug hit the floor, breaking near her bare feet, splintering into fragments, searing her alligator skin. The jagged edges lay in nearly every corner of the tile floor.
The final crack in a day of unending pressure.
She stared down at the mess, every vertebrate in her body frozen, yet tense and rising, her blood hotter and stronger than the spilt peach tea, but her brain muddled — an avalanche of deadlines and bills, emails and chores. Happy was at the end of that list. Happy had been ignored.
Happy had spilled out onto the floor.
She knelt down, cracking a put upon smile, ready to pick up the pieces, to start again, to throw away, to make new, to boil and rise and dunk and stir, ready to sweep and cut and burn.
She refilled the kettle.
Intent on pouring a new mug.
She eyed the chair with the indented cushion.
She would sit, put up her feet and scorch her tongue on the leaves harvested and dried in the sun. She would surrender to the energy evaporating from the chamomile.
And tomorrow would be fresh.
Another day.
With no mistakes.
Isn’t that what all the great characters say?
About the Author: A.R. Hadley
A.R. Hadley writes imperfectly perfect sentences by the light of her iPhone.
She loves her husband.
Chocolate.
Her children.
And Cary Grant.
She annoys those darling little children by quoting lines from Back to the Future, but despite her knowledge of eighties and nineties pop culture, she was actually meant to live alongside the lost generation after the Great War and write a mediocre novel while drinking absinthe with Hemingway. Instead, find her sipping sweet tea with extra lemons on her porch as she weaves fictional tales of love and angst amid reality.
A creative writer since elementary school, A.R. all but gave it up after her children were born, devoting herself to the lovely little creatures, forgetting the pleasure and happiness she derived from being imaginative.
No more.
She rediscovered her passion in 2014 and has not stopped since — writing essays, poetry, and fiction. She is currently working on completing several novels as part of a romantic trilogy.
Day or night, words float around inside her mind. She hears dialogue when she awakens from sleep. She is the one who has been awakened. Writing is her oxygen. Cary Grant fans the flames.