By Sonia Mehta

Agatha settled the once-white doily under the third teapot, this one lavender with a cracked spout like a ceramic mouth missing half its teeth. She poured anyway, tea dribbling from the spout, pooling onto the dark oak table. Agatha gave a soft tsk, dabbing at the mess with the edge of her cardigan sleeve. “Millicent never minded a bit of mess, did ya, love?” she murmured, winking at the empty armchair nearest the window. “Said it reminds her of fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Mud and mildew and no milk for three weeks! Isn’t that right?”

She paused, laughing softly, and set out the cups: six this time, bone china mismatched by design. The orange one with the hairline crack belonged to Giles, who always drank Russian Caravan with a side of skepticism and a snarky comment about the decline of empirical evidence. The tulip cup was for Claudia, milk in first, fiercely, even in green tea.

It was the third Sunday of the month, after all. Teapot Club day. Twenty years ago, when Agatha started the club, every month her fellow anthropologist colleagues flocked to her home for chatter and biscuits. Over the years, they dropped off at a trickle, slow at first, then fast.

Agatha fluffed all the cushions and then lowered herself into the creaking floral armchair in the center of the little circle she’d arranged, socked feet crossed neatly, teacup trembling slightly in her hand. Her joints, slowly becoming covered in tea sloshes, were stiff today. Her arthritis always acted up in the winter, and Vermont’s dry, crisp air had never been kind to her.

“Claudia,” she said into the circle, “you’ll be happy to know I finally finished that horrid dissertation draft you warned me about. You were right, as usual. The title was absolute rubbish. I went with Pottery and Power: A Feminist Reappraisal of Ceramic Exchange in the Upper Orinoco instead.”

She took a shaking sip and waited, eyes flicking toward one of the empty chairs.

Silence.

“Too long?” she asked the ghostly Giles. “Yes, you know what, I thought so too. Always the sensible one, Giles!”

She laughed.

She didn’t hear the knock at first. Then a second, louder. Agatha froze. She didn’t think she’d had a real knock in years.

Earlier that year, Agatha had installed an electronic doorbell, a sleek, modern contraption she’d bought online after a particularly depressing infomercial. It had not rung once. Not even for the Amazon delivery man, who always just left packages on the porch with a sigh.

The door creaked open with effort. On the threshold stood a young woman with frizzy dark hair tied in a scarf, balancing a small plant in one arm and a tray of scones in the other. Her eyes darted around the room, landing on the empty chairs and the excessive number of teapots.

“Hey. Hi,” the woman stammered. “I’m Tani.”

Tani had just moved into the house across the road. She was new to Bennington, new to Vermont in general. She knew absolutely no one and had moved in during the coldest time of the year. She was feeling particularly lonesome when she stumbled across a thread on the neighborhood Facebook discussing—in quite a mocking tone that went wholly unnoticed by Tani—a tea party club hosted by an old professor at the college. “A splendid affair if I ever saw one! ;;;)” said one comment. “A proper Victorian séance, bring your own Ouija board!!!” wrote another. Tani, she thought, liked tea and adventure.

“I’m sorry,” said Tani at the door, feeling suddenly embarrassed. “I just moved into the area. I saw something about a tea club on Facebook and—well. And then I thought, I don’t really know anyone here, so…yeah. Sorry.”

Agatha blinked.

“Oh my! Well, we are a closed club,” she mused slowly, her eyes sliding to the scene in the sitting room as though appraising the situation. A beat of silence stretched, filled only by the gentle steam rising from the teapots. Then, a delighted smile bloomed across her face. “But we do have a chair. Lucky for you, Jaspar couldn’t make it today. Always overbooking himself, that one!”

Tani stepped inside. The smell of bergamot, lemon balm, and rot lingered in the air, something faintly herbaceous and a bit too long in the tooth. She looked at the circle of empty seats with polite curiosity, a tiny frown tugging at her brow. She set the scones down on a crocheted coaster that was immediately stained with jam residue.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt something,” she said.

“You didn’t,” Agatha replied quickly. “You’re just in time. Millicent was about to start in on her opinions about the tenure process. But she’ll understand.”

She motioned toward an armchair—the one with the embroidered cat cushion, long flattened with use. Tani hesitated, then smiled and sat.

“Can I ask, what was this club? Originally, I mean?”

Agatha’s eyes lit up. “Anthropology. We started it as a little rebellion, really. Third Sundays. A potluck of opinions and questionable biscuits. We’ve… downsized, you could say. Some moved away. Others moved on, in the larger sense.”

Agatha poured Tani a cup from the broken-spouted pot. “But traditions matter. Don’t they?”

Tani nodded. “They do. I studied ethnobotany, actually. Before I got into science writing.”

Agatha blinked again, then broke into a delighted smile. “Ethnobotany! My dear girl, why didn’t you say so earlier? You must try the spearmint blend. Picked from my garden. Nothing like what they sell in bags.”

For the next hour, the room filled with voices. Real ones. Tani’s laughter, first polite, then genuine, mingled with Agatha’s stories. The armchairs no longer felt like shrines, but seats at a table with two, not six, not imaginary. Two was enough.

Agatha poured tea without glancing at the empty chairs. She didn’t need to. Millicent, Claudia, and Giles had their turns. They’d made space for this.

As Tani packed up her tray to leave, she paused at the door.

“Same time next month?” she asked.

Agatha nodded. “Third Sunday. Teapot Club. Bring your ant stories.”

“Only if you promise to show me that dissertation draft.”

Agatha’s eyes twinkled. “Only if you promise to be brutal.”

As the door closed, she stood in the silence and looked around the room. The chairs remained, but the ghosts were gone.

She poured herself one last cup. No spilling this time.

*   *   *

Sonia Mehta is a university student living in Ohio who loves to write prose and poetry in her spare time. She is the Editor-in-Chief of a female-run online literary magazine, the Celtic Literary Review.