We’re pleased to announce the winner of the March WWWC: Valerie Volk! Responding to the prompt ‘reading the tea leaves’, Valerie’s ‘Tea Time’ follows a woman who practices in unusual healing methods confronted by the angry spouse of a former client.

Read Valerie’s winning story below.

Content warning: this story discusses mental health and suicide.

‘You’re not at all what I’d expected.’

The speaker is truculent, his body language aggressive. He sits, shoulders square, feet apart and planted firmly on the floor. Interesting, Clara thinks, that he’s chosen the hardest, most unwelcoming seat in the room, well back from her desk.

She gets up now and moves to sit closer to him. No point trying to talk with that desk between them. He’s refused her offers of tea, coffee, something to drink. Suspicious of any friendly move, she decides. He’s on the attack. No point in taking offence. Speak gently.

            ‘You know your wife used to come here?’

            ‘I told you that on the phone.’

            ‘You also know that anything we discussed was in confidence?’

            The man laughs bitterly. ‘I can imagine the sorts of things she told you about me!’

            ‘Very little.’ Clara tries to pacify him. ‘We talked mainly about her and why she had come to me.’

            ‘Hah! That’s it. That’s what I want to know. Why did she come to see someone like you?’

It’s amazing how much venom he can pack into those last words. She is used to it. There have always been people suspicious about any thought of seeing the future. She’s been called ‘quack’ by many. Fraud. Snake oil salesman. Con woman. Imposter. Fortune teller. Charlatan. And others far less repeatable.

Yet it is often those same people who are quick to turn to the astrologer column in the daily papers, and to check what the stars have in store for them that day. Quite likely Mr Foster does that too, but not a good idea to ask him.

‘You know,’ she moves the pot plant further along the coffee table, ‘that’s what your wife said the first time she came here. She’d expected someone different. I think she’d thought that someone in my field would be a little less … ordinary.’

 He does not look convinced, but repeats the question. ‘You still haven’t said. Why did she come?’

Clara had wondered that herself. For several sessions the drab, faded little woman had said little, just cried quietly, dabbing her eyes with a crumpled handkerchief until Clara moved the tissue box close to her.

She would drink her cup of weak black tea, then look despairingly around the room, just shaking her head in answer to Clara’s gentle questions.

            ‘How can I help?’

            ‘What is troubling you?’

But the woman would not say. At the end of the hour she would leave an envelope with money and look at Clara.

            ‘Next week?’

Each time Clara nodded she felt guilty taking the envelope. She had done nothing. But sometimes that was what her clients needed. Just a safe space to sit, even if they didn’t talk. If they came with questions, with things they needed to know, sometimes it took a while before they could express them.

It was only during their fourth session that Clara voiced her concern.

            ‘I don’t feel that I am helping you. What can I do?’

For a long time they just sat. No attempts she’d made had brought any response. Yet Mrs Foster kept coming back.

            ‘Elaine,’ she said gently, ‘how can I help you?’

            ‘I just want to know. I thought perhaps you could tell me. Maybe you’d have a crystal ball or something.’

            ‘Nothing like that. Sometimes I read tea leaves.’

            ‘That’s what my Nan used to do.’ The woman’s eyes clouded over at the memory. ‘She was good at reading the tea leaves. She could always tell us what would happen next.’

            ‘Is that what you want to know? What will happen next?’

Mrs Foster simply shook her head and put the envelope on the coffee table. Clara did not expect to see her again.

Yet the weekly visits still came, and outside the window the golden elm’s spring green faded into summer and finally into the glorious gold of autumn. She came to feel the woman’s misery.

            ‘What’s it all for? That’s what I want to know. What will become of me?’

She refused all suggestions of doctors, psychologists, medication, and would only rarely give any hint of her marriage or home. Clara drew on every scrap of her experience, but nothing worked. Elaine Foster ignored every overture. The woman just came and sat. She no longer cried – that was something.

It was unsettling. Something about her was eating away at Clara’s confidence, and she was tempted to refuse to see her again. Yet when she suggested ending their sessions, the woman had looked so desperate that she had relented.

            ‘Why do you come to me?’

            ‘One day you might be able to tell me…’ her voice trailed away.

            ‘Tell you what?’ Clara had urged. But Mrs Foster just shook her head and heaved herself up from the couch. For a small woman she seemed to find her body a weight, an impediment, and her movements were slow and awkward.

            ‘Would you like to bring someone with you? Your husband – or your daughter?’

Mrs Foster looked more terrified than ever, her eyes scurrying around the room like a frightened rabbit.

            ‘Oh no. Not at all. I couldn’t do that. They don’t know I come here. They wouldn’t approve.’

            ‘Of me?’ Clara had been intrigued.

            ‘Not you. But what you do. They don’t want to know.’

Men often didn’t, Clara had reflected later. Her own husband was often impatient with how she spent her time.

‘Get rid of her.’ Tom’s advice that night at dinner was brutal. ‘She’s upsetting you. You haven’t been yourself since she started coming to you. Tell her you’re finished. After all, it’s not as if you’re qualified.’

Stung, Clara had defended herself. ‘But I do help people. The others come because they believe what I say.’

            ‘More fool them. You can’t really look into the future.’

            ‘I don’t pretend that I can.’

Now she recalls how it had started. Almost a joke, with friends. ‘Reading the tea leaves’ they called it, laughing. But gradually their morning teas together had become times of contemplation, even meditation. People must have heard about her, because soon there were others who came to talk to her. It might have started over the tea cups at the kitchen table, but now women came to her, hopeful, asking. They must have been reassured by the very ordinariness of her living room, she thought. The ritual of the cup of tea.

‘I don’t really read the leaves, Tom. No one believes that. But they just want someone to listen to them.’

He simply raised an eyebrow in that annoying way he had and laughed.

Clara had stayed silent, seething.

She knows that often she has been able to help people look ahead and see a path to take. But not this woman.

It was a relief when, as suddenly as she had started coming, Elaine Foster missed an appointment, and did not reappear. Perhaps, Clara thought, she found her answers to the questions she could not voice.

But now this man is forcing her own question on her. Why had Elaine come?

            ‘What does your wife say about it?’ She tries to keep her voice cool and detached, but feels uneasy when he stares incredulously at her.

            ‘You didn’t know? My wife’s dead.’

            Shocked, Clara stares back. ‘No, I didn’t. I’m so sorry. When did it happen?’

            ‘Call yourself a mystic! Where’s your second sight now? Thought you’re meant to be able to see things like that!’

            ‘Like what?’

            ‘She killed herself. Three weeks ago.’

They sit in silence. Then she forces herself to go on.

            ‘How? And why?’

            ‘Took all the sleeping pills in the house. And that’s what I want to know from you. Why?’

            ‘I can’t answer that.’

He looks disbelieving. But she sees only baffled rage, no pain in his eyes.

            ‘She gave me no hint that she was feeling like that. I think she came here wanting to know about life. What it was for.’

‘You didn’t help her much, did you?’

            ‘No,’ Clara admits. ‘She wouldn’t listen to anything I said. Or suggested.’

            ‘You don’t seem to be very good at it, do you?’

Clara flinches. He sounds just like Tom. Can’t they see that sometimes just talking helps? But then again, it didn’t this time.

‘I don’t think she really wanted answers. She was just so unhappy. Nothing we talked about gave her any hope. She wanted to see what the future held for her. I couldn’t help her find out.’

The thickset man drags himself to his feet, still angry. ‘I guess she’s found out now. Maybe you could have stopped her somehow. Perhaps you should have looked into your crystal ball. Or maybe even read those tea leaves for her.’

Clara sees him through the front door, the leadlight panel reflecting its colours on his face. She turns into the kitchen, contemplating the familiar, comfortable room.

Yet it is almost uncontrollable, the urge to smash the teapot.