![\"\"](\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/files\/2012\/10\/tealeaves.jpg\" "\\"tealeaves\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nTEA LEAVES<\/p>\n
I watched Edna covertly as she folded, spindled and mutilated the morning paper.\u00a0 “The horoscopes are on page seventeen,” I said mildly.\u00a0 As usual, she ignored my remark.\u00a0 She had been ignoring my remarks for most of twenty?seven years.\u00a0 I sipped my cup of tea.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 “Aha,” she said at last, folding the paper over on page seventeen.\u00a0 “Taurus.\u00a0 Listen, Alonzo.\u00a0 Take great care in the morning when disturbances will arise, but look forward to a restful afternoon.<\/em>\u00a0 Well, that’s not very exciting.\u00a0 Would you like to hear yours?”<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I did not, but I knew from experience she would read it anyway.\u00a0 I said nothing.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 “Here it is ? Virgo.\u00a0 A great change is coming for you today.\u00a0 Look forward to a restful afternoon after disturbances in the morning.<\/em>\u00a0 Why Alonzo, yours is almost the same as mine.\u00a0 How strange!”<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For once, I did find Edna’s obssessional reading of the horoscopes of interest, but I did not answer, as a matter of principle.\u00a0 I always refuse to answer to the name of Alonzo, just as I refuse to call my wife Velisande.\u00a0 My name is Arthur.\u00a0 My wife’s name is Edna.\u00a0 No crackpot numerologist in the world is going to change that, not so far as I’m concerned.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 “Edna,” I said, “your tea is getting cold.”\u00a0 She reproached me with a face of hurt resignation as she picked up her cup.\u00a0 That look was so habitual and practiced that I’m sure it had become a conditioned response to the syllables of ‘Edna’, like the saliva of Pavlov’s dogs.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 “Disturbances in the morning…” she mused aloud.\u00a0 “Oh, I hope it doesn’t mean that awful Wilcox woman is coming to the seance.\u00a0 Honestly, Alonzo, just because she ruled in Atlantis thirty thousand years ago, she thinks she can push the rest of us around.\u00a0\u00a0 And I have to say, with an aura the colour of hers, she should not<\/em> be wearing that bright red coat.\u00a0 Did I tell you about the last time she came, when…”<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Edna had told me, twice in fact, but she proceeded to tell me again.\u00a0 I turned my ears off and let my mind wander.\u00a0 What a silly woman she was!\u00a0 Of course, I had not always thought so, and this remains a source of sorrow and embarrassment to me now.\u00a0 There was a time when I found her supernatural leanings alluring, when I enjoyed the role of skeptical man?of?the?world squiring the slim young mystic from s\u00e9ance to UFO lecture, from fire-walk to biofeedback session .\u00a0 How long did it take me to realize that mystic meant fatuous, that the dreamy dark eyes were the windows of a vacant mind?\u00a0 Not long, not long at all, but by then it was too late.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Painful realization began to dawn on our wedding night, which I spent miserably in the armchair of our modest honeymoon suite.\u00a0 Edna had observed distressing portents in, of all things, the way the chicken bones were disposed on my plate after the main course of our wedding supper.\u00a0 She proceeded to confirm the inauspiciousness of the night by casting the I Ching<\/em> while I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom, tremulous with anticipation.\u00a0 A simple case of bridal nerves, you might say, but that night turned out to be an accurate predictor of the course of our entire marriage.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Have you any idea at all how many supernatural, holistic, New Age, spiritualistic, parapsychological, and extraterrestrial fads can come and go in the space of twenty?seven years?\u00a0 I lost count about a decade ago, but I know for certain that Edna picked up each and every one of them, and retained the most irritating features of each when its main vogue had ended.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The ouija board phase, for example, went on for nearly six months.\u00a0 It finished only when Edna left the planchette ? the little triangular plate that scuttles around the ouija board spelling out messages ? on the floor, where I stepped on it and was sent flying into the fireplace.\u00a0 Naturally Edna was not concerned about my broken ankle; she was too upset about her broken planchette.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 She had several periods as a channeller, a sort of spiritualist medium.\u00a0 All of them were pretty grim, but the most wearing was the phase when her spirit guide was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh called Ramopatra, a being given to the most long-winded and vapid utterances in the history of human speech.\u00a0 Predictably, the fact that I could not find this pharaoh mentioned in any book of Egyptian history did not deter my Edna.\u00a0 I did not mind the others quite so much, and was even quite amused by a Native American known as Chief Thunderbottom, but I am still embittered by the effect of all that rapping and turning on my heirloom rosewood dining table.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Then there was the black magic phase, when Edna (who had already become Velisande) joined a local coven of Satanists devoted to the celebration of black masses.\u00a0 There were a few perks to this period. \u00a0I am partial to chicken, for example, and she rarely came home from a sacrifice without one.\u00a0 When roast goat began to appear on the table, however, I drew the line.\u00a0\u00a0 There was no telling where it would end.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I think the worst time was her conversion to a cult that practiced a combination of yoga, Vegan diet, post-modernism, and astral projection following vigorous bodily exercise, but abstained from almost anything else you could name.\u00a0 It was a nightmare.\u00a0 The eventual death of her guru from malnutrition was, I’m sure, as welcome a release for him as it was for me.\u00a0 Have you ever actually tasted<\/em> soybean-and-quinoa hash?<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ah, the endless series of minor and major irritations!\u00a0 The spoon-bender who went to work on the family silver.\u00a0 The familiar that had kittens in my golf bag.\u00a0 The palmist who performed some expensive sleight?of?hand with my cheque book, the mental telepathist who sensed a cherished bottle of old brandy through two closed doors.\u00a0 The list goes on and on.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A gasp from Edna broke into my bitter musings.\u00a0 “Alonzo!” she cried, “Look! Look at the tea leaves!”\u00a0 She was staring at the bottom of her cup with an expression of horror and despair, her face an ugly green.\u00a0 “I see death in the tea leaves, Alonzo!\u00a0 Sudden relentless death!”<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 “You’re wrong, my dear,” I said calmly.\u00a0 “There’s nothing in the tea leaves.\u00a0 I put it in the sugar.”<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 She looked at me stupidly.\u00a0 Then she choked and turned an even uglier purple.\u00a0 Her throat rattled and she crashed onto the floor, overturning the chair and the table in her death throes.\u00a0 At last she was still.\u00a0 I sighed.\u00a0 It would be a busy morning ? disposing of the body, cleaning up the mess she’d just made, laying false trails for her friends and the police and so forth.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Fortunately, I could be sure of a restful afternoon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In honour of Hallowe’en, here is an updated version of\u00a0the first story I ever sold – way back in 1987,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fic","category-light-relief"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}