CUPPA

Callum McGee

There are three deadly sins to making tea. Too much milk is saccharine. Too little stirring sours your tongue black. Placing a mug down without a tea mat is damnation.
            Where has the flavour gone? Tasting our marriage’s bitter, yet cloying, decline in my cuppa.
            A fervent heat pulses through me at how thoughtful he once was. My husband’s cuppas were savoury and brewed with care. I miss the hot kettle steaming our apartment windows – the snap and crunch of ginger biscuits. He used to come into our bedroom, the orange ripples of dawn peeking through our curtains. My tea instructions were gospel to him – everything from the ratio of a teaspoon of sugar stirred with a quarter oat milk. He poured the tea into my moon mug – Neptune-blue, dotted with diamond stars. A silvery crescent sparkled through the gaps of my fingers. It was part of a matched set, always aside his mug centred with a bright yellow sun. But I loved the sweet, crimson rose he left on the tray most – a rosebud in bloom, laced with cherry-red thorns. My husband once called me his rose. Sweet and succulent, yet prickly and proper. My cheeks flushed in his ardent embrace.
            What did I do wrong? My hands shiver under my blanket. His side of the bed burns my skin like dry ice. My husband used to put effort into my tea. I crave his hot, steamy cuppa inside me, desperate to warm the numbness left by his touch.
            His cuppas are lukewarm, like the autumn sun, lacking heat. After he smashed it in a fight, my crescent mug shattered under my bed.
            Like his recent sex performance, he stirs my tea with limp fingers. I spoon the ghost of our marriage.