Bird-shaped Cup

(A story based on “Tea with the Birds” by Joanne Harris)

Mortimer Street is, in every sense, gray. The street, the buildings and the people who live in them, everything is equally polished in the same tone of monotonous, dreary gray. Like a community of strangers, no-one really seems to know anybody else.

She was one of those nameless people on Mortimer Street. A faceless somebody who everybody took for a student. That she wasn’t, but to get known was never her gold anyway. All she wanted, all she went looking for, in that little street, was peace and silence. Sometimes mainly peace, sometimes mostly silence. And in her little yellow painted flat she found all the peace and quiet she needed. With that came the cozy type of happiness she craved so much for so long.

All was well until the day a very mute Japanese man moved into the apartment across hers. Then, like the strange sounds of the wind announcing stormy weather, that tiny oriental man ruined all the quietness she fought so hard to find. It’s true she hated him for a while. It’s true she cursed him, sometimes more than once an hour. But that war simply wasn’t meant to be, not cold at least. So one day she found him waiting for her with a peace offering in the shape of a cup of tea. She found him and he found her, at the table, by the tea, near the scones.

That day the armistice was signed, never to be broken again. Like in every storm, silence had followed rain, only now they had each other to share the subtle little nothings, so common in peace time.

Rogério Ferreira