The Keepers' Evil

Fifty-Seven: It's nice to meet you, by the way

Song- Freaks: Surf Curse

"It's nice to meet you, by the way."

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It had started with a twitch, one that had cascaded down my arms and into the very tips of my fingers. I was surprised that I had noticed it at all amidst the sting of all the other parts of me that hurt, for it was such a delicately small flutter in comparison to what I awaited when the windows let the darkness leak inside. I ignored its presence in my day to day adjustment to the curse, disallowing its shackles to halt my independence, continuing to keep it at bay with occupying my mind.

But then the twitch had become too obvious as I held a paintbrush or a quill between my fingers, and it became accompanied by a quiver of my muscles and a brief shake to my bones. It was unusual, this strange symptom that I had never seen before, yet I would have been foolish to believe that the curse held a limited list of potential problems. I still continued on, choosing to pay no mind to it, keeping my focus on the tasks that I knew distracted my nervous system from the pain.

Painting had become too monotonous, repetitive in the views that I could find. I had painted in the bay windows of the front room, detailing the empty streets as the curved leaves became layered in a sheet of green and brown, sometimes orange too. I had then painted in the garden, finding the scurry of squirrels and their tiny paws that clawed their bodies up towards the top of the tallest trees above me, sometimes holding entirely still through this unwelcome twinge to offer a peanut from my fingers. I had painted the paintings of my mother and father again, I had painted Sebastian, Ominis, the golden flick to Madeleine's hair when she stood in the light. I had painted it all, seen all that life had to show me, and I had started to run out entirely of ways to keep my mind away from this discomfort.

The singular constant that I had craved tea in every corner of the day would forever remain, the warmth and the sugar that lapped against my lips, the way that it trickled down my throat with a sticky honey-like taste and soothed my inner torment. I had tiptoed upon the cupboard and countertops to reach my mother's old teapot with its now dusted white handle and its cream spots that showed its age, and the ingrained scent of florals and strawberries into the ceramic edges ignited a new past time.

Tea flavours and combinations were not thrilling events that one would choose to spend afternoons contemplating, perhaps only if company was expected, but if one was trying to forget, or at least somewhat dim, the expected arrival of an onslaught of a torturous soreness to every curve of one's joints, perhaps it was something that could be considered fun for those.

My mother had told us once that tea was not just simply tea in the presence of company at your own home, it could display what kind of character sat beneath your bones too. I could remember giggling at her stories of travelling to visit other professors who had offered her something as boring as an ordinary tea bag whilst she had always been one to serve vibrant flavours of fruit and spices.

I had dove into the cupboards, stuck my hands deep into the drawers, and rummaged intently with my fingers into forgotten bags, to determine exactly where my mother had founded these opinions and where she had developed them. It had taken a few hours to pull all that I desired to find together, to set my hands around cardboard cases of an array of teabags to test as she would, but I began, one day at a time, to test the flavour combinations. I had found it rather exciting, a difference to my day and a new way to ward away the exhaustion in my existence.