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Start or end your story with a character making food or a drink for themself or someone else.

Posted in Short Story on Jun 27, 2025

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✍️ 71 stories

The Mourning Tea

Submitted to Contest #309

The kettle screamed, and so did the voice in the steam. Iris Blackwood pressed her palms against the kitchen counter, watching vapor rise in ghostly spirals. Three months since David's funeral, and she still heard whispers in every sound. The kettle held secrets. She reached for the mason jar on the highest shelf, her movements deliberate and reverent. Inside, dried petals caught the afternoon light like fragments of bone. Corpse-Blooms. The name felt sharp on her tongue, a word that belonged in old books and darker times. Yet here they were...

40 likes 21 comments 21
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We Were Sisters

Submitted to Contest #309

It is Thursday. After 44 hours of work in four days, it is my evening to rest. I barely toss a couple of bean tostadas together and head straight for the TV when the tune of “Time After Time” blares from the bathroom, where I must have left my phone when I washed my hands. I make my way in there and see “PeeWee” flashing across the screen. It’s my sister, Viki. I answer, “Hello?” “Hey, is that KFC still open, down the street from you?” “Umm…I’m not sure but I think, probably, why?” “I got some new posters and stickers today. Wanna hit em ton...

19 likes 11 comments 11
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Lamia

Submitted to Contest #309

The smell of the meat crisping over the small fire is overwhelming, teardrops of golden fat dripping on the flames is all I must appear to hear. I will make no sudden movements nor let my breath quicken lest the beast towering behind me feels my fear and senses my sleeping children. I see her cursed body shaped against the wall, shaped by the bright night outside, its blessed light stronger than the fire I’ve lit to musk their nocturnal sounds and scent. A serpent tail is sweeping the air behind her, making a swooshing, whip-like sound that ...

16 likes 4 comments 4
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The Hunt

Submitted to Contest #309

The last of the salt pork hissed in the pan with bitter accusation, its meagre fat rendering into something that might charitably be called sustenance if one possessed sufficient imagination and desperate hunger. Duggan Flint worked the iron skillet with the methodical care of one who had learned to make miracles from scraps, his weathered hands coaxing flavour from ingredients that had surrendered their dignity weeks ago. The galley of The Siren’s Revenge bore the scars of recent violence—splintered timber, hastily patched, and the ghost of...

16 likes 4 comments 4
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Fancy Brits

Submitted to Contest #309

They first appeared in mid-July, just as the wasps began to hollow out the grocery store awning and the county’s water-tower sprang a rust-colored leak down its northern thigh. A man in a pale beige suit emerged from the tree line behind the First Baptist overflow lot, walking upright and without visible fatigue, though the field behind him was thick with foxtail and broken beer bottles, and no road, paved or otherwise, passed within ten miles of that stretch. His suit was crisp, unsuited to the season, and his shoes gleamed with a polished ...

15 likes 2 comments 2
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The Last Cup

Submitted to Contest #309

The kettle whistled just as the morning sun spilled through the kitchen window. Nora reached out to switch it off, the steam rising like a ghost in the air. She plucked the spearmint tea bag from the ceramic jar and dropped it into her favorite chipped mug, cream white with blue vines painted around the rim. It had been her mother's once. Everything in this house had been her mother’s until it became hers. As the hot water rushed over the tea bag, coloring the mug with earthy greens, she felt that familiar pang, like missing someone in a dre...

12 likes 8 comments 8
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It's Not Depression

Submitted to Contest #309

“I’m goin’ out for a sm—” is what I say, or what I have started to say, only to be interrupted by the infuriating sound of the kitchen’s POS system (that’s Point Of Sale, not Piece Of Shit), a beep-beep-beep that does everything it can to sound chipper and cheerful; however, the feelings it elicits from your humble narrator are anything but.“Ah, so close,” Andy, my kitchen manager laughs. “I’ll see you out there.”“Yeah, yeah,” I grumble, reaching for the box of blue, powder-free nitrate gloves. “Every fucking time I try to go for a smoke. Ev...

12 likes 6 comments 6
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LAST SUPPER

Submitted to Contest #309

LAST SUPPER The piece of paper in my hands with the recipe I had decided on-- torn long ago from my grandmother’s Betty Crocker Cookbook --was a bit yellowed, It felt fragile, and it even gave off an old timey kitchen-y smell...faintly aromatic of what? Bread flour out of an old wooden bin? Melting butter? Yeast rising? Maybe my imagination was just running away from me. This would not be a day like any other in the kitchen. I read the instructions and the list of ingredients again. For the third time. Could I make it? Despite all the ma...

11 likes 4 comments 4
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~ Breaking Bread ~

Submitted to Contest #309

~ Breaking Bread ~ Debbie, The Erran Comista of Earth and Shewuma, Hopi Kachina, were hard at work cooking their “family” dinner. The menu was steaks, bacon, and scrambled eggs for the Carnivores. Also french-fries, green beans, and biscuits for everyone else. It had become tradition to have all of her brood over on Sunday to eat, drink a little and discuss the past week’s events. And this week had been a humdinger. Corrine and Daniel arrived and would stay as long as it took for Debbie to reverse Corinne’s recurring cancer. Jimmy and Grandd...

11 likes 2 comments 2
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Dissolution

Submitted to Contest #309

The air was heavy and thick, like inhaling mud; lungs stopped expanding after half a breath. A sticky sweat was pasted onto her skin and seeped into her clothes, even her cotton panties could be wrung out. She stood on the threshold and watched the leaves on the trees dance about in the wind, but it wasn’t strong enough to push through the screen covering the aluminum frame of the storm door. Part of her, the nagging voice that wouldn’t give up, wanted to take iced tea to the porch, sit on the weathered steps, and enjoy the moment when the e...

11 likes 6 comments 6
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Good Daughters

Submitted to Contest #309

I stared at Nick’s hands as they deftly wielded the thin silver instrument around the lemon, effectively slicing off a perfect curly-q of bright yellow peel. The movement of his hands and the delicacy of the peel bore stark contrast to the thick, long fingers punctuated with knobby, bony knuckles. It was like watching a mob thug conducting an orchestra. I glanced into his eyes, which were half obscured in shadow, and stifled a giggle. His ruggedly handsome face was contorted into the face of a young boy’s; his eyes sparkled with intense co...

10 likes 1 comment 1
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Her

Submitted to Contest #309

She brewed herself a cup of chamomile tea, the delicate steam curling up like a fragile promise of comfort.Sitting on her couch, she took slow, tentative sips, feeling the warmth spread through her chest even as a cold ache settled deeper inside. The clock on the wall ticked steadily, its hands inching toward nine p.m., but time felt meaningless—just a silent witness to her endless nights. The sounds of the bustling city filtered through the thin walls of her apartment, merging with the faint sound of her neighbors. Yet inside, the emptiness...

10 likes 2 comments 2
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JASMINE AND SALT

Submitted to Contest #309

The kettle hissed long before it whistled. Mira stood barefoot on the cool title, her fingertips tracing the chipped rim of the porcelain cup. She hadn't used it since her mother passed. Not out of grief-at least not solely-but because it always felt like a ritual and she hadn't known what she was invoking anymore. The Jasmine tea leaves, curled like sleeping beetles, lay in the faded tin with its leaves half-peeled. She scooped a spoonful into the steeping basket, inhaled. The scent rushed up-flowers in a summer rain, memories buried under ...

10 likes 5 comments 5
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Midnight Coffee

Submitted to Contest #309

Content Warning: Mentions of physical and domestic abuse Sophie grabs the light blue mug from the back of the cabinet, wiping off five years of dust on her shirt. Its quirky design of two pugs riding a tandem bicycle makes her smile; she'd forgotten how determined the front pug looked to get them where they needed to.“How have you been?” “Come on, Sophie. That’s not what you want to ask.” She scoops sugar into the empty mug, slides it underneath the Keurig dispenser, and presses the 12 oz. button. She tries again. “...where have you been?” ...

10 likes 0 comments 0
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Two Minutes

Submitted to Contest #309

The small travel kettle let out a shrill whistle, stirring me from my thoughts. I poured two cups of boiling water over peach tea bags. The water turned a faint orange hue. When the color settled, I lifted the string of my tea bag and watched the colors swirl once more. I started to lift the tea bags out, but her voice floated through the air. Two minutes. No more, no less. I dropped the bags back in and leaned against the cool stone, feeling the solidity of it against my spine. The morning sun hadn’t yet crested the hill, allowing us to rem...

10 likes 2 comments 2
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