Spilling the tea

It was dark inside the teapot. Crowded, too. Cast iron walls created a cavernous chamber that was both loud and cold. Around him, Smith sensed an endless sea of sticky flesh. It should have been warm, all those bare bodies, but instead, it felt clammy like a feverish chill. It made Smith's skin crawl; made him retract and contort and twist. No matter how he flinched, there was only more cold, sweating flesh; and without his vision, that was all there was.

That, and the screaming.

The screaming echoed, vibrated through his teeth, filling his cavities with an aching symphony. The flesh was yelling, “What’s going on?,” “Where are we?” “Let us out of here!”, while knuckles and fists broke against the impenetrable walls. Smith’s heartbeat throbbed behind his eyes, and his breath roared from his quivering lips.

There was more than fear in this dungeon. Like a nightmare, confusion fueled their terror. Smith was disoriented, but he clearly wasn’t the only one.

Despite the darkness, he closed his eyes and gasped for air, swallowing it greedily. He knew panic was dangerous; he had to calm down. What was happening?

Wasn’t he just eating dinner with Jasmine? Weren’t they just joking about the silent couple beside them as they twirled Alfredo-sauced linguine in quick, tight circles around their forks?

He’d noticed the shadowy figures in his peripheral vision, stepping out from the alley that lined the back of the restaurant patio. He remembered how quickly he dismissed them, catalogued them in a part of his brain where they were unimportant. Passersby, like everybody else.

Jasmine was important. She was so beautiful in those pearl earrings, in his favorite dark wine lipstick, in the ambient glow of outdoor string lights. What a blissful moment of naivete. What joy in anticipating his next bite of $36 house-made pasta. It’d been a day, no, a week, at work. He deserved it.

They arrived at their table so quickly, grabbed him even quicker. Three of them surrounding him, from left to right, behind him, their hands securing his torso with a frightening firmness. There was hardly time for reaction. Jasmine barely stood, barely uttered a spurn sound or demand for his release. He was taken before anyone could object, gone before suspicion.

It was unclear what happened once they turned the corner down that alley. Smith remembered his shoulder blades sinching together, his back made concave by the shock of whatever their infliction. He remembered falling, but not to his knees, not forward towards the floor. The world around him grew larger, escaped him like he’d dropped into a spiraling tunnel. Suddenly, he was like a pebble nestled in a groove of the concrete. Disorientation anchored him to his humanity, told him he wasn’t dead, but refused to tell him more than that.

Then, there was the teapot.

It appeared in front of him like a redwood, majestic and ginormous. Its landing was as loud and turbulent as an earthquake. Covering his ears, he watched the hand of a giant open the teapot’s lid. A crushing grip lifted him from behind, and as he hovered above the mountainous kettle, all he could think about was Alice and her rabbit hole. At least she’d chosen to drink from the bottle. At least her bottle gave warning. At least…

“It’s not a dream.” Smith heard the voice clearly. It brought him out of his nightmarish memory and back to the nightmare. The chaotic symphony of screams around him faded. His ears reached out, and he looked frantically in all directions as the bodies around him morphed, bumped, and ungulated at his sides. He pushed back against them now, gripping arms, forcing the contact to be intentional, straining his eyes as he searched for the voice's owner. It had to be close.

One woman gripped him back, shrieking, “My children! Where are my children?” Another whimpered, begging with a quivering jaw, “I’ll be good, I’ll be good, just let us go.” A man shoved him, “Get your fucking hands off me!” The force of it sent him stumbling backwards through the sea of hysterical flesh, and as he regained his balance, Smith sensed something strange in the crowed: a stillness that didn’t belong; a bearded old man staring directly at him.

They locked eyes, ignoring the panicked bodies passing between them. Smith felt his eyes adjusting, the details unraveling slowly. The man was sweating, dirt smeared across his cheeks and chest. His beard was peppered with greying hairs. His hair was mangled and overgrown. His eyes were grey, like distant clouds rolling in.

Smith reached his hand out. “Hey, man, what did you –”

“It’s not a dream,” he repeated.

When Smith made contact, a firm grip on the man’s wrist, he felt an overwhelming comfort. There was relief in their connection, relief in how the man didn’t pull or push away.

“Do you know what’s going on? Where are we?” Smith breathed.

“We’re in the teapot,” the man said.

“What? How— What does that even mean? How is that even possible?” Smith was so distraught he couldn’t even ask the question that mattered most.

The man broke from Smith’s grip and pointed to himself, then to Smith. Then, he flipped one palm face up, hovered the other over it, and slowly lowered the top towards the bottom. “They made us small.”

So, he hadn’t imagined it. Smith glanced around, as if seeing it would make it easier to believe. All these people: Terrified. Miniaturized. Trapped.

“What is this? What is happening? What are they going to do with us?”

Miming along, the man sang, “…when I get all steamed up, hear me shout! Tip me over and pour me out!” A mad craze filled his eyes as he giggled, pouring out his imagining kettle. His smile was eerie, made Smith shiver. He couldn’t look away from the madness blooming in the man’s eyes, his smile, his shaggy hair, his convulsing body. He was a mad scientist, a prisoner isolated for too long, a psychopath off their medication.

And then he wasn’t. In a split second, the madness disappeared. His body stilled, his smile straightened, and his gaze fixed back on Smith, a light of sanity blinking back at him.

“It’s some kind of punishment. They’re trying to punish us,” the man said flatly.

“Punish us for what?”

Bodies pushed against the man, and he absorbed their impact without resistance, swaying all with the current. “All of these people have done something they don’t like. You must have, too.”

Jasmine’s face flickered in his mind. Her olive eyes shimmered gold the night he told her he loved her. She didn’t have to say it back; she just batted her eyes, and he knew. Then, the darkness that spread through them when he told her what he did for a living, a hardened shade of green that reminded him of clovers. Smith had prayed they would bring him enough luck to keep her from leaving.

“Who are they? How did they find us? What kind of punishment?” Smith demanded, his volume rising. Around him, the bodies roared: “Punishment! They’re going to kill us!”, “No, no, no!”, “I have to get out of here! I’m claustrophobic!” The heavy breathing remained asynchronous; the screaming, disjointed.

Smith stumbled at their sound, but the man remained unflinching. “Tell me, Smith, do you believe in right and wrong?”

“What?”

“Do you think things in life tend to be black and white, or do you find yourself operating in grey areas?” the man continued, arching his eyebrows.

The question struck Smith with more force than the flesh around him, more powerful than the ocean.

“Nothing you tell me can change how I feel about you,” Jasmine had said, her soft hands squeezing his hands. She was so gentle. He couldn’t stop thinking about how fragile she was, how much he loved her but didn’t deserve her.

What would he do without those olive eyes?

“I help people,” he’d began. He’d never told anyone he cared about, but he’d practiced.

She’d laughed, stroked the stubble on his cheek. “Of course you do. You’re such a sweet man.”

Smith had wanted to curl into her palm, but his body reacted first, gripping her wrist and pulling it from his face. “No,” he’d said. “I’m not.”

It was the first time he’d pulled away from her. She was shocked, but before she could object, Smith added, “I’m capable of things other people aren’t.”

Visibly nervous, Jasmine pulled back. Her retraction was slight, but Smith felt the distance in miles.

“I help people…die,” Smith uttered the final word breathily. The d-sound was hard, spoken through clenched teeth, but the rest of the word faded, as if he’d killed that, too.

For a moment, neither of them took in air. Instead, they stared, listening to each other’s heartbeats, like spaceships taking off in different directions, and Smith watched as the clovers snuffed out Jasmine’s olives, bringing a cold, dark winter with them.

The man’s laughter folded around Smith like a sheet of snow. “I mean, children, Smith? Did no one teach you that killing children is wrong? What could be more black and white than that?”

The familiar feeling of guilt exploded out of him. “It’s what they wanted! I was just trying to help them!”

“Doctors are the ones who should be helping them, not you!” The man chuckled like Smith’s justification was the punch line to some hilarious joke.

For the first time in the teapot, Smith’s body felt hot. The miniaturization, the naked flesh, the shadowy figures, none of it scared him as much as the truth of his own life. All those children were going to die anyways. All those families, they had asked for his help. But those facts never, not once, made it feel right.

With a loud, reverberating thud, the dungeon shook. The bodies crashed into each other and screams filled the chamber again. The teapot had been set down.

“So, what?” he yelled. “All of these people are like me?”

“Killers?” the man shrugged. “Not all of them. Some of them found other grey areas to work from, loop holes that assisted their immoral activities. All of them deserving of this,” he widened his arms, though there wasn’t much space for them to open. “At least, according to them.”

Smith tried to look around at all these people, all these people like him who’d existed out in the world that he’d never known. People like him, who’d carried dark secrets close to their hearts, survived on faulty righteousness and poorly sculpted justifications, and were eaten alive by their own guilt every time the sun moved. He wished he could see their faces. He wished this wasn’t how they were meeting. His mind raced, trying to piece together and process what little he knew, filing through his most guarded memories for more answers.

“Wait, how do you know my name?”

The man’s laughter hummed in the darkness. Just then, a woman grabbed Smith’s elbows and pulled him close. “Help me, help! You have to help me get out of here!”

“Be careful what you wish for,” the man warned. “What makes you think it’s going to be better out there and not worse?” As he said it, he pointed up. Smith followed his gesture, tilting his head backwards. There was more darkness above him, but a small stream of light shone through the pot's steam hole. Then, the ceiling broke open, and a brightness filled the pot. The lid had been removed.

Some gasped, “Heaven!” Some cheered. Others shrieked, just as terrified about leaving the pot as they’d been about entering it. Smith shielded his eyes. The woman beside him was muttering a prayer under her breath, squeezing his arm tighter.

“What are they going to do to us?” Smith shot at the man. “How do you know so much?”

The teapot jolted, and the feeling of rising followed. The man had started singing maniacally again, “I’m a little teapot, short and stout…” amidst all the noise of panic. Then, the teapot was a cruise ship in cruel waters, flinging the crowd towards the wall as it tipped on its side. They were getting dumped. They were pouring the tea. The question was where, where were they getting poured? And what was going to happen to them once they were out of the teapot?

Somewhere in the chaos of screaming bodies being thrown into and above and around him, Smith heard splashing. There was a body of water somewhere. Would it be hot? Would it be cold? Would it sting like acid or burn like lava?

As Smith slid closer to the opening, the adrenaline numbed him against the scratching and digging of fingernails and jaws clamping down. He felt the teapot shaking furiously, heard the boom, boom, boom of a hand patting down hard on the bottom of the kettle. He was sliding faster now. There were less and less limbs to hold onto.

His freefall felt like hours. He surveyed the new space with reestablished vision. Around him were boulders, huge behemoth-like rocks with small holes along their surface. It reminded him of pumice stone or lava rocks. Below him was a body of water. It looked fresh, and judging by those who’d already made it there, it seemed as harmless as fresh water. There was screaming, but they were screams of terror, not pain. Smith wouldn’t have noticed the caves if everyone had not been swimming towards them. Why were they swimming so fast?

His answer fell from the skies. Bright flashes of lights flew towards the water’s surface like fireballs, and when he looked up, he saw where they were coming from. Atop the large boulders were armed guards. They held long staffs that they pointed down towards the water. Each flash of light was accompanied by a zap! zap! zap! Each zap that made contact made its target disappear into a spark of white.

When Smith landed, his body instantly responded, his arms striking the water repeatedly, his legs kicking fiercely, his mouth spewing out gulps it didn’t mean to take. His body tried to be faster, tried to fight through the turbulence. He saw the end of the cave in the distance, and for some reason, it felt like the end zone, a safe place. He imagined Jasmine standing there, waiting for him. He pushed himself forward. Water splashed violently in all directions, lights sparked, and screams were being silenced all around, but he didn’t stop.

The back of the cave was a blur. As it got closer, the only thing that became clearer was that his vision was becoming more obscured by water slapping over his back, by the encroaching darkness, by the intensifying echoes, a war zone of pure chaos. Smith reached out for the wall, not caring when it broke his skin. He pressed his face into it, breathing heavily. He’d made it.

As others joined him, he realized this wasn’t the end. There were still flashes of light; the cries were increasing. There was no where else for them to go, no hope of safety. This must have been how his clients had felt when they reached out to him: defeated, petrified, trapped with nowhere to go.

The person beside him, Smith recognized as the woman in the teapot who’d asked for his help. She was whimpering, sobbing. They gravitated towards each other; he wrapped his arms around her. He wondered what she'd done to deserve this.

“If you’d let the children die how they were meant to, we would have granted you the same fate, Smith.” Smith turned at the sound of the man’s voice, expecting to find him in the water with them. But when he located him, the man was standing on a landing in the cave’s far corner. He was wearing a guard’s uniform, yielding a staff.

“Is this not clear enough for you?” the man yelled, spreading his arms wide. “No bad deed goes unpunished. You should know that. Now, let’s spread a little light into that darkness.” He pointed the staff directly at Smith.

The woman ducked her head into Smith’s chest, and he squeezed her tighter. It felt vaguely familiar, foreign, too, all those long embraces he watched parents take after his work was done. They had each other to hold, to mourn with, but until he’d told Jasmine the truth, he’d never had anyone to fold into.

Smith stared the guard’s staff head on, trembling with anticipation. Here he was, afraid, desperate, and vulnerable, at his life’s own end, yet the guard’s eyes were fervently ablaze. Smith wondered if the same fervency was seen in his eyes as he pulled the plug on those children, couldn’t bear the thought that even a hint of it was visible. He squeezed them tightly shut, focused on his final heartbeats, his spaceship taking off.

Smith didn't know where he'd go once the staff went off, but he sensed that he would never get to recommend the best house-made pasta he'd ever had in his life, never get to say, It's worth the money; he'd never get to kiss Jasmine's bare skin again, and thank her a thousand more times for staying with a man she had to relearn to love. He thought of all the parents who hadn't received the worst news of their lives yet; how he'd never touch their broken hearts, wondered if it was for the best. Smith thought of all those bound pages sitting on shelves, assuring the world that Alice did make it out of her rabbit hole, only to discover she'd dreamt the entire thing.

In the arms of a stranger, Smith heard Jasmine whispering the words she’d used to console him, like a mother reading the end of a story to her child: You’re still a good person. And as the first zap sounded, Smith almost, for a moment, believed them.