Brewed Tea on Cold Desert Nights

Just before the crash, the plane cabin fills with a floral scent, and the desert outside the window erupts into bone flowers. Sami’s transport ship tips on its side in the dense green sand, one wing warped, and the ‘tea expert’ he was meant to land safely in the city at the tea expo is alive—but not, as far as he can tell, happy about it. “What sort of pilot are you?” Tsun snarls, kicking sand with her boot. She still has her helmet on. A thick crack runs down the length of the visor. He helps Tsun unhook her bag of ‘accoutrements’ from the overhead mesh. The desert is a desert again. His stomach growls. He hasn’t eaten in three days and she was his meal ticket and another mark on his record means he’s on probation and now his hunger is making him hallucinate. “A good one, or we would have given the desert its first rain in more than a hundred years. Blood’s as good as water in these parts.” “My tea is worth more than blood.” She raises her hands in exasperation, waving towards the glint of the city in the far distance, the lone cactus, then back to the smoking transport ship. “Look, I’ll get you there.” The same trite saying spray-painted in curlicue font on the side of his plane. He presses a mostly clean oil rag to the cut above the tea expert’s eyebrow and moves her hand up to hold it in place. “The shitting sand must’ve gotten into the intake, maybe melted into glass and gummed up the turbine.” He taps the worn and dented frame of his ship twice. I’ll be back, he thinks. But the desert stretches wide and the gravity’s weight pushes down. It’s hot and she takes off the helmet. Her fingers are longer than a human’s. Her eyes, larger and higher, verging on insectoid. Truly otherworldly, he thinks. Not that he can talk, an itinerant pilot for the past ten years. What world could he really call his own? She pulls a wooden box from her ‘precious bag’ and opens the lid, swearing under her breath. “Something wrong?” She snaps the lid shut, puts it hastily, but carefully, back in the bag. “Okay, pilot. Let’s see that guarantee. Get me to the city.” The sand makes it slow going. He can feel her eyes burrowing into his back. “So, on the planet I grew up on—” “You’re not from here?” “As much as you might want to lump me in with the urbanites, I’m just a farm boy. What was I saying? The gravity here is much higher. It can make you feel sick.” He feels it at his fingertips, in his heart throbbing in his throat. The stars begin to pattern the sky as the planet’s green suns dip toward the dunes. The tea expert falls behind. She’s bent over, hands on knees, but eyes locked in the direction of the city. Clearly the atmosphere is getting to her. Too thin, he thinks, for where she comes from. “Give me the bag.” He didn’t come all this way not to get paid. He marches back to her and grabs the strap. She shoves him. “Don’t touch me.” “At the rate we’re going, we aren’t going to make it.” He pulls the strap again and the bag slips from her shoulder. A knife presses against his ribs, secreted in her boot. “Oh, the little tea alien has teeth.” There’s something feral and wrong in her eyes. Her lips are turning blue and she swings the knife wildly. A strange floral scent fills the air and burns his nose. The same scent before they crashed. She grows larger. A cold shock of terror runs down his spine. Some sort of hallucinogen? The desert warps, elongates into fields of wheat, a slack wooden house haloed in a blast of stars. His old home. “Stop!” And, surprisingly, she does. She pulls herself inward, becomes small, pushing her legs up against her chest, falls to the sand. “What was that? That smell. What did you do to me?” “A defense that my people have. It gives us a chance to get away. Open my bag,” she says, and seeing him hesitate, “The effects will linger unless I treat them.” He helps ease it off her shoulders. He sets it down gently. She opens the cinched top and pulls out an assortment of strangely shaped glassware and a heavy cast-iron teapot. His head swims, the desert seeming to breathe around him. “Pour the oil in the receptacle, quick. The visions will only get worse if you don’t.” His mother is standing on the porch of the old house. The windmill with the broken slats is turning. Her skin is sallow and wrong. He’s been finding bits of her, nails and teeth around the house. North, she said. North. Look north. North will get you home. He finds a jar of yellowish-green oil in a separate pocket on the back side. Flowers shoot up from the sand. Open petal by petal. Die, regrow. The craftsmanship of the bag itself is something to behold, each section clearly given a purpose. No amount of space wasted. “You made this?” He’s here and not. “I needed a way to travel with my wares. Wasted space is wasted time.” He marvels at the deftness with which she puts together the boiling apparatus. Like flying a plane. Leaving them all behind. Muscle memory, as close to you as your sinew. His heart beats fast. A cold sweat under his clothes, the farm field in the periphery of his vision, wheat growing wildly. Sometimes new pilots couldn’t take the g-forces necessary to leave the atmosphere, all the blood rushing out of their brains, that faraway dazed look right before they faded. The stars come out, foreign and strange even after all these years and all the transports. North. Look north. “Pour the oil into the reserve. Carefully, we can reuse it. I’ll need it for the expo.” He pours gently. He can see her hands shaking in her lap. That’s why, he thinks. There’s no way she’d give this up otherwise. Just like he wouldn’t give up the flight controls. The atmosphere is getting to her. “Tsun, what next?” “The leaves. The top box. Open it and let me see.” He does and is instantly hit by a variety of herby, flowery scents, like the hallucinogen. “These three,” she says. “Coca, muña, anise. Turn it down a bit. I don’t need the water so hot. It will damage the leaves, break down the compounds. The pressure here makes the boiling point higher. It can break the glass.” She leans in as the tea approaches boiling. “What do you look for?” “Color, scent, saturation.” She turns the small handle, and the flame drops in intensity. “Pour me a cup. And then yourself one too.” He does, and there is a perfect amount for both of them. He drinks and closes his eyes. The tea warms him instantly, a tingling trail down his throat. The hallucination dissipates; the fear melts away. The field recedes. “We can still make it,” she says and looks toward the city. But when she tries to stand, her knees buckle. She cradles the tea box in her lap and tears collect above her lip. “I have to get there.” “These expos happen every year. You’ll have another shot.” “Not if I miss my timeslot. I’m here to represent our satellite.” “Which one? I used to fly deliveries out to a few satellites,” he says. “Not mine. We were isolationists up until a year ago.” Oh, he knew the satellite then, forced to open because of dwindling resources. “Everything started to die off. We didn’t know why.” The suns are nothing more than a sliver of glowing light on the horizon. The stars appear sharp. He feels more at home with them above him. “We learned to navigate by the stars,” he says. “North. How I could always get home if I needed to. And I could then. On my own planet, there was never a question of becoming lost. Some pilot, huh? But not anymore. I don’t have a planet to go back to.” “I’m sorry.” “It happened so long ago.” The steam from the tea rises between them. “The expo will put us on the map. Right now, they don’t care. We’re nothing to them. But maybe they could care about our tea. Have you tasted anything like it before?” “No, never,” he says. “The conditions on our satellite make the sweetest, most tender leaves. We’ve perfected it over thousands of years. Just like us the tea possesses the power to transport. I’m the first delegate ever at this expo, and I have to make it there and give the best presentation and be the best. We’re ‘expendable, not worth wasting resources on.’ But we could be.” The desert sky burns in stars. He hears sirens, quiet, maybe for them. He wants to tell her to sit. Hell with it. “Let’s work together. I’ll fly your tea for you. Let’s paint the logo on the side of my plane. I’ll be fired after this, anyway.” “You’re kidding.” “I work for one of the most in-demand flight services in the tri-planet area. You haven’t heard of us, but I can guarantee anyone in that city knows my name. I’ll drop flyers, include the tea satchels with it. We’ll get the word out.” “It won’t be enough.” “It will be something. I guarantee it.” “They want what they can never have.” She keeps her eyes on the stars. “Maybe I’m wrong in bringing it directly to them. Sometimes I think they did it to us. Poisoned something on our satellite so we’d have no choice but to open and let them in.” And then she says no more and goes no farther. This time, she doesn’t stop him when he eases the bag from her shoulders. “The city doesn’t love anyone. Even the ones who think they’ve made it. There’s only this.” And what is this? Two people, he thinks. It sounds like something his mother once told him—the sky sharp and blue and cloudless. Wasn’t that old farm paved over now, all its diseased life encased in cement? And where did that love go, then? When he left, it sank into the graves. But maybe it went elsewhere, too. They watch the stars, and there is silence between them, only the gentle wind pushing the kernels of sand. She sits up straight and prepares the tea. Her eyes locked on her work, lit by the glow of the fire under the bubbling water. The tea is fragrant and sharp and there is a hint of a smile on her lips. She hands him a cup. The first sip. As good as the stars, as good as flying. The steam warms his desert-dried sinuses. Maybe when she prepares the tea, she goes back to her satellite. “Okay,” she says. “We can fly together.” Sami is on the old farm, and he hears the planes overhead, their engines high whines like insects in the white and yellow wildflowers that grow near the road. There is no terror this time in the vision, only a sense of calm, of gone things brought back. His world is young again, and there are still so many places to go. ∘ ∘ ∘