In catching up on all the things I didn’t do last week, I’m still too behind to post anything new. So here’s another old piece of flash fiction. I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote it. Perhaps you’ll have a theory.

     Her lover had come back from the dead and was standing in her kitchen, drinking a cup of herbal tea and eating one of her homemade scones. He was holding the cup with three fingers, as he had done on the mornings after their lovemaking had been most intense and memorable. Steam rose above the rim and drifted toward his face, disappearing in his beard, now flecked with gray and bushier than she remembered. He said

     Hello

     and she screamed. The fear in her voice startled him. He managed to hold onto the scone but dropped the tea, the cup turning slowly one and a half times before it hit the tile and shattered, the liquid spattering his boots and the legs of the table. It spread across the floor like blood, running into the cracks between the tiles where it formed shallow, linear pools.