American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,54

contain is not tea leaves, or tea pearls, or anything so orthodox. These are teas Mrs. Benjamin seems to have made herself, and they have a distinctly fungal look to them. In one vial Mona can see thick yellow globs of pine pitch, and there is something green and loose sprouting from the top. Its label reads OLD PINEFEVER. Mona guesses this is what Mrs. Benjamin was drinking the other day.

There are many more. In one stoppered flask are half a dozen pink, fleshy roots suspended in something that looks a lot like Lucite. This is labeled ASTER’S CURL. In another a mass of white moss floats in greenish fluid, and this is labeled MAMMON’S TEARS. There is an Erlenmeyer flask with a powdery, cloudy fungus growing on the bottom that is paired with the name AL BHEEZRA’S REMORSE. And then there are three vials whose contents look like herbs ground up with white or yellow soap crystals. These are labeled AGONY, then WRATH, and finally GUILT.

Mona reads these a second time. She names her teas after emotions? she thinks. But a small part of her, one that has to be a little bit nuts, says, Or maybe she makes teas out of emotions.

Unbelievably, the tea racks get weirder. (And the farther Mona goes into the closet the darker it feels, though there is plenty of light.) The names become utterly unpronounceable: EL-ABYHEELTH AI’AIN, HYUIN TA’AL, and CHYZCHURA DAM-UUAL are just a few. What they contain is difficult to make out: the jars appear smoked, like someone left them in a barbecue pit. After this, the labels use an alphabet Mona has never seen before. She can’t imagine the country that uses this alphabet, either: it is such a harsh series of slashes and strokes, and so many of the letters stand at strange angles to one another, like they are not meant to be read left to right, but up and down, or right to left…

Where the hell did she get these from? Mona wonders. Did she make all these herself? Around here?

Mona picks up one jar and turns it over. Like the others, this one is smoked, but there are places that are a bit clearer. The contents look like a bunch of small grapes hanging from the jar’s lid, but they’re oddly yellowish, and they jiggle strangely. They keep jiggling even when she stops turning the jar over. It takes her a minute to realize they are turning, and on each grape is a dark spot that seems queerly reflective, and each grape turns until the side with the spot is facing her…

Almost as if it is an eye, Mona thinks. As if there’s a bunch of tiny eyes hanging from the inside of the jar, and they are all staring at her.

She gasps and nearly falls back, but a pair of hands helps steady her.

“Goodness, dear, whatever is the matter?” asks Mrs. Benjamin’s voice.

Mona jumps back the other way, for what she’s found in the tea racks makes her just as frightened of Mrs. Benjamin as she is of the thing in her hand. Then she looks around at the tea racks, and sees that all the strange jars are gone: she sees no smoked beakers with labels in an alien language, nor does she see any teas that resemble bizarre scientific experiments. Even the jar in her hand has changed: it does not contain eyes, but jasmine blossoms.

She looks back at Mrs. Benjamin, and there does not seem to be anything that frightening about her, either. She’s just a worried old lady standing at the door to the tea closet.

“Did I startle you?” she asks.

“I… I think I need to sit down,” says Mona.

“Did you lose your balance?” asks Mrs. Benjamin. She helps Mona to a chair. “It happens to me all the time. One moment everything is crystal-clear, the next the world is wheeling around me. One of the defects of this old body of mine, I suppose.”

She gives Mona a glass of water. Mona drinks it quickly while glancing back at the tea closet. She is half convinced that at any moment it might change into that room of disturbing specimens again, yet nothing happens.

“Did Mr. Macey leave already?” she asks.

“Yes,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “He just stopped by to tell me some news. Or what he thought was news. It’s not news if you already know it, is it?”

“What was the news?”

“Oh,” says Mrs. Benjamin vaguely. “You know us old ones. We do