While sipping my tea in the morning, I find a small, two-inch long naked female corpse on the bottom of the cup. Her white skin fades into the white porcelain, tiny gobs of tea leafs cover her round breasts. I immediately slap the cup down, and snick across to the phone to call the police. I forget all about checking if she’s really dead. Of course, how could I give her mouth to mouth resuscitation, otherwise? Her body is about the size of a match-stick.
I walk in circles, up and down the kitchen, when the doorbell finally rings. Two detectives arrive, eyeing me suspiciously. I let them in, and point at my table. They hem and haw while examining the body in the cup.
“You know her?” the older one asks. I tell him, I’ve never seen this woman in my life.
“Did she drown?” I ask.
“The autopsy will soon tell,” answers the detective, taking out his camera and taking pictures of the crime scene. The younger one asks for nail-scissors and locks himself in my bathroom with the small corpse. I nervously offer the other detective some tea.
“I once knew a fortune-teller who could read the future from these tea-leaves,” he yarns, slurping at his hot drink. “Sounded crazy to me, but the newspaper wrote that there was a man who found the winning lottery numbers in his cup. And you know what? He’s a rich man now.”
“Yeah, I would have preferred the lottery numbers too,” I admit, and the detective begins to laugh. His partner steps out from the bathroom, with some fresh blood-stains on his shirt. He’s holding a plastic bag with the body of the poor girl and the dirty nail-scissors I had given him. He’s handing them to me, and I don’t reach for so he just puts them on the table.
“Well… She drowned for sure,” murmurs the man. The other detective nods, and puts on his hat.
So, this was yesterday. Since then, a yellow police-line has cordoned off my kitchen table – they tell me I can’t tear it until the investigation is over, and it would be better if I wouldn’t do any cleaning in the kitchen. When I woke up this morning I found that I didn’t have the strength to make any tea. I just couldn’t get rid of the image of that dead girl, laying on the bottom of the cup. Every time I thought about it the nausea began to squeeze my stomach. So I decided to visit the bar at the corner instead, and just ordered a cup of black tea there. As the waitress arrived, somehow she looked very familiar – this pretty girl placing the streaming tea down on my table with a strange smile on her face.
“It is so rare, you know. A man ordering tea. Men usually want coffee,” she prattles on, and finally, I do recognize her. Of course, I’d seen this woman before– yesterday. Laying in the bottom of a cup. The blood drains from my face and I react to the situation in the dumbest possible way: I stand, put on my coat, and run from the place without a word.
At home, an open door greets me. Three men sit in my kitchen, with steaming cups in their hands. Two I recognize immediately – the detectives, they are back, but this time, they brought along an old fashioned guy with a wig. Some kind of judge, I guess.
“I’ve some bad news,” begins the older detective with a strange and somehow evil grin on his face. “It looks like the girl was drowned by someone else. The microscopic pictures revealed signs of a struggle on the body.”
I collapse into a chair, and try to say something, but I’m breathing heavily now. Only a few words escape my mouth – they are fluttering in the room, getting lost in the tea’s steam.
“In the bar… The girl… Black tea… The lottery numbers…”
This, of course, doesn’t make any sense.
“I hope you understand, we have so many cases that we can’t allow ourselves to sit on any one case for too long,” one policeman tells me with a sharp, unsparing voice, tapping the judge’s shoulders.”So, we must speed things up a bit here and start your trial, well. Now.”
This is madness. I want to rail against this ridiculous treatment but I know that any resistance would be useless. So instead, I give the judge a sincere look of appeal as he begins swirling the tea cup between his fingers, trying to read out a verdict from the tea leaves waltzing within.
The kitchen is dead silent. Everyone gazes at the judge’s shaky gray hand, at the cup in his clenched fingers, each of us hoping to glimpse the blackness inside, where it seemingly never stops swirling.
Zoltán Komor was born in June 14, 1986. He lives in Nyíregyháza, Hungary. He writes surreal, bizarro short stories that he later translates into English. He published in several literary magazines (Horror, Sleaze and Trash; Drabblecast; The Phantom Drift; Gone Lawn; Bizarro Central; Bizarrocast; Thrice Fiction Magazine; The Missing Slate; The Gap-Toothed Madness; Wilderness House Literary Review; Caliban Online; etc.) His first English book, titled Flamingos in the Ashtray: 25 Bizarro Short Stories, was released by Burning Bulb Publishing in 2014. His second English book, titled Tumour-djinn was released by MorbidbookS in the same year. You can visit him at www.zoltankomor.com.
YOU CAN FIND HIS BOOK ON AMAZON!
Kafka Review 