I had been holding on to this acceptance for such a long time, and then I went and missed updating my site when it came out. Terrible behaviour. Bad job, me. This story was accepted by the excellent Fred Coppersmith of Kaleidotrope all the way back in 2021! It’s one of my oldest short stories, and one of my favourites.
“Black Tea, Cream Tea, Chocolate Tea, Blood” began its life in March 2017 as a response to a prompt during a prompt challenge with my best friend and often-creative partner in crime, wherein we wrote a paragraph or two in response to a prompt and swapped at the end of the day. We came up with the prompts ourselves, and this one later became the title. It was a much shorter, and quite a different beast back then. It makes me want to go back and look at the rest, see if there’s anything else worth mining.
After considerable rewrites and a couple o’ thousand more words, this story grew, and I love it a lot.
You can expect:
☕️tea
☕️a good wife
☕️yearning
☕️retribution, or good, old-fashioned matricide
If that sounds like your cup of tea—I’m just going to let that linger for a moment… Just a little longer. Okay. Good—give it a read in the Autumn 2023 issue of Kaleidotrope!
elou carroll 