The Civilised
Tea Pary
by Bobby Morris
In their small
wooden house in the American Midwest, British ex-pat
IT workers Michael Mutton and Eric Hyde were
enjoying afternoon tea. They were seated at a
table by the wall, and they had before them a pot
of tea, two filled cups, a saucer of milk, and a
plate of cucumber sandwiches whose crusts had
been cut off. They were sipping at the tea and
nibbling at the sandwiches.
“I was
thinking about the Tea Party the other day,”
thought aloud Michael.
“The
political movement?” asked Eric.
“No, the
actual Boston Tea Party.”
“Where
they tipped all those cases of tea into the sea?”
“Yes.”
The two men
shuddered at the thought.
“Well?”
probed Eric.
“Well, I
was thinking that those revolutionaries were
fools. Not so much in what they were trying to
say, but in the execution of it. You see, they
could’ve made the political point without
actually losing the tea, if only they’d
spent a bit of time planning it. My specific idea
was that they could’ve boarded the ships
secretly in the first instance and substituted
the tea for soil, and then boarded them again
openly in the second instance and made a show of
emptying the crates.”
“I say,”
said Eric, putting his cup down,
“that’s a jolly good idea. But you know
what the sad thing about it is? If we shared it
with our American co-workers and friends,
they’d see it as a criticism of their
revolution, not as the win-win situation for the
revolutionaries that it would obviously have been.”
“You’re
probably right,” muttered Michael. He picked
up his cup and took another sip, before
continuing. “Something else I once thought
about the American War of Independence is
that—”
He was cut
short by a loud thud against the outside wall,
which caused both men to dramatically slam down
their teacups.
“What the!”
they said in unison.
There was
another thud, and the horizontal planks of the
wall began to snap inwards. The men got up and
backed away from the table at this point.
The wall bent
further inwards in response to further blows from
the outside, and the men froze in terror and
gasped when a grizzly bear forced its way in. Its
torso, its powerful arms, and its angry head came
through, but its legs seemed to remain outside
and below the level of the tabletop. The bear
scanned the room superficially, before turning
its attention to the table. It grabbed one of the
cups and downed the tea, then did likewise with
the other one. It then grabbed the modest pile of
sandwiches and stuffed them into its mouth,
unconcerned by the few slices of cucumber that
slipped out.
Satisfied that
it had consumed everything available, the grizzly
bear extricated itself and headed back into the
wilderness.
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