Average mischiefs

Rose could not quite place when it was that it first started, or indeed really when she had first noticed that there was anything at all that was actually starting that she should have noted. It was a simple thing, at first. The book she had placed on the little rich elm table now sitting forlornly upon the carpet upon her return. The table itself being a decent hand’s length from where she had left it before setting out with the knowledge that there would be nobody at all about the house in her absence.

Really, perhaps it ought to have been a little more glaring than it was, but in the poor woman’s defense, she had rather a lot on her mind at the time things started getting… odd that it was almost too easy to miss things that seemed, at the time at least, perfectly inconsequential. The only reason she could assume she did not pay the matter the attention it warranted was that it simply must have happened around the time the walls to her house had begun to change. But now that she had gotten used to the sight, the odd fleshy walls with their steadily beating pulse and worming veins, she could not help wondering if her priorities might’ve been a little askew.

That said, it was not as if she had expected her acquisition of the little eight-legged table to be utterly inconsequential. Elm trees had a notorious dislike of mankind, and that clung to the wood in such a way that whatever was made from it was inevitably more ornery than was necessarily deserved. This was not her first experience with elm, after all, as she had been gifted a hat stand that was determined to reject any hat that found itself in its vicinity, going so far as to snag at the donned hat of a passerby if they made the mistake of drawing too near.

But there was a difference between a hat stand having a distinct dislike of hats and a table that had taken it upon itself to skitter and scamper about the house like a peculiar spider.

Now, if there was anyone who was capable of wrangling the disagreeable table into behaving, Rose would have liked to think that it was her. After all, while she had chosen not to follow in her parents’ paths and work with the Magics, she had picked up a thing or two over the years all the same and so had at least a working understanding of things. She did wonder, too, if that might have been at least a little bit of the reason why it was she had the habit of coming into oddities, being something of an oddity in her own right, which she liked to think was something that worked in her favour.

Well, she would have liked it to be working in her favour, but if the sound of her tea cup – just a plain little thing she’d picked up after doing someone a favour a few months back that she held no real sentimentality towards, as she wasn’t willing to risk anything she was particularly fond off – shattering against the floor of the parlour, she made the safe assumption that it was not, in fact, going as planned. Clearly trying to get the table into the habit of behaving as such by familiarizing it with carrying things wasn’t going to be as easy as she would have liked it to be.

Much like trying to train a dog, or some such beast, it was clear that it was not going to be a straightforward process.

Landing somewhere between amused and bemused, she rested one hand on her hip, the other raised to her mouth to let out a single sharp whistle. Within moments, a clacking scuttle filled the air as the table bounded into the room on its odd, curly-carved spider legs. Though it was no grander in stature than the coffee table it was supposed to be, it was of great relief that she had been able to train it out of jumping up at her. It did not like people, but time had left it fond enough of her to get excited upon seeing her that it assumed she had the intention of playing with it at all hours of the day.

Okay, maybe it was not just time that had played a part in convincing the elm table to like her, but Rose would not admit either way if she had taken it upon herself to spoil the skittery furniture a little more than it deserved at times.

“What was all that about, eh?” asked she, arching an eyebrow.

Of course, she knew the table would not understand the words themselves but she was careful enough with her tone to not sound too much like she was chastising the table, but likewise that she was not there to play.

Much as tables were wont to do, it did not reply. Unlike the usual habits of a common table, however, it accompanied this silence with a cheery little trot about where she was standing. It felt a little strange to claim that a table was capable of feigning innocence, but that was almost certainly the case in that moment.

“Did you enjoy breaking my cup?” she continued with her insincere interrogation, “I’m sure that you did, didn’t you?”

How scandalous, the beast of a table bucked back onto its twin sets of front legs, as if showing off. Of course it was having fun, it might have decided to like her a little more than one would think, there was still much of its ingrained nature that had found root – literally and metaphorically – that meant it was a little more prone to mischief than a table typically would be. That said, she did not have much comparison to go by making claims like that, she would not imagine an oak table would have any inclination towards doing anything beyond sitting still and playing the good, nice table that everyone would be delighted to rest things on without wondering if they might be promptly strewn about the house. Not that she had much experience with oak.

For all of her intentions of pretending to be serious about it, she let out a little giggle before she could quite catch it behind her hand. It was all very well and good to know she needed to play at being stern in order to try and train good behaviour, but that did not mean it was going to be nearly so easy and manageable in reality. It was just a little guy, and one that had only been able to properly start moving about for a handful of months at most, as far as she was aware. So patience was necessary, and a virtue, and very exhausting at times, because it was young and living through its first time being alive as a table and not as a tree, which she could imagine was all very odd.

She had the intention of trying to get the table to behave as, well, a table at first but somewhere along the way, before she had the chance to notice her own diverting intentions, the table had managed to fill more of a role of a pet than a functional piece of furniture. Even still, she did want to be able to rest things on it, so she was still determined to try and find some space between the two. Not that there was an easily identified middle ground, but she prided herself on her ability to find something for herself when there was nothing to be found.  

“Yes, yes, you’re very cheeky,” Rose tsked, bending down to give the tabletop an affectionate little pat, “I was hoping to sit down and have my tea, you know? Mary gave a book the other day and I have it on good authority that it makes for excellent tea-time reading.”

Which usually made for a slightly kinder review of something than it did in that moment. Typically, if either of them concluded a book ought to be taken with a cup of tea, it meant that it was just engaging enough to need a different form of sensory stimuli to keep it interesting enough to not abandon the text altogether. A book taken with a sandwich, or cookies, or some similar such light snack, however, made for a story engaging enough to easily forget to stop and have a proper meal.

Not that she had as much time to stop and read for a while, as she had to keep an eye on the arrant nonsense that a certain piece of furniture was getting up to in her house if left to its own devices for too long.

On her brief journey to the other room to clean the absolutely expected mess, she could not help but wonder if the table was doing just as good of a job at training her habits as she was of its. After all, she passed by a cabinet that held significantly more dull and easily sacrificed tea cups than she had owned at any other point in time. She did not want to sacrifice any of the cups that she did like, and it was easier to hear something like a cup breaking further in the house if it happened than something just falling off the table, and so she had made a bit of a habit of picking up the occasional cup or the like when she was out. What an odd precaution it was to need to build a collection of things that a table could break in advance, just in case!

That said, she had gone through seventeen of the cups – two that she had liked, thirteen that she was unbothered about, one that had put the idea in her mind that the table had started moving, and one that was a necessary sacrifice to confirm this fact – in the few months since the table stops pretending it was unable to move, so perhaps it was perfectly rational to stockpile the cups.

It was no surprise that her life was an odd one, and even less of a surprise that her house was even more odd than herself – or perhaps it served as a rather decent representation of her inner world reflecting across her outer world – but that did not mean it did not, on occasion, strike her as absolutely ridiculous. For someone who had decided she did not want to find her work in the Magics, she certainly managed to cultivate a life that was absolutely surrounded by it in every way it possibly could be. But maybe that was okay. Maybe she’d found something that was nearing a middle ground, something that was comfortable and suited her very well. Sometimes it was annoying, having to clean the collateral damage the table caused when it was in a mood, or even worse. Worse, in this instance being the necessity of having to explain the oddity away to any guest who might choose to pop by without knowing quite what they were getting themselves into before knocking at her front door. It did not bother her though, after all it was her own strangeness and her own house, and if someone might lose their hat about it, that was just a fact of life.

As it was beginning to seem the inevitable, just as Rose had decided that she was content with the sort of strangeness that took the shape of her life, the universe decided it was high time to add yet another little dash of the odd into the mix for good measure.

From the cabinet, unprompted by any movements on her end or anything going on in the other room, one of the freshly obtained tea cups decided right now was the perfect time to clutter against its saucer.