It took a sip of surprisingly good hot tea, the best tea it had ever personally tasted, from a delicate looking white porcelain tea cup and began to bare its soul, figuratively speaking, to the man who had handed it the cup in the first place.

“You know how they say you never forget your first time?” it asked without preamble of the man sitting across from it on the other side of the worn two-person wooden dining table.

The man nodded, taking a sip from his own tea cup, all the while doing a poor job of concealing his irritation and boredom.

The thing drinking tea pretended not to notice and continued. “It's when I realized that I hadn't forgotten my first time, I had no real memory of it all, that I began to suspect that I wasn't . . . well . . . real.” As it said that there was a sour taste in its mouth that not even the tea could wash away, but that was nothing compared to the sour feeling in its stomach. It'd done its homework on this man before barging into his kitchen, and it knew the man was as likely to destroy it as he was to help it, more likely to destroy it, in fact.

Before its arrival it had told itself that the chance of knowing the truth was worth any price, but that was before it had been told in no uncertain terms to slow down, sit down, and wait for the tea to be ready like “any half-decent pretense of a proper guest” before doing any more “babbling.” And now, drinking deliciously unreal tea from a fantastically fragile porcelain cup while sitting at a battered table in a dilapidated kitchen done up with faded and peeling white and yellow floral print wallpaper had piled up one too many layer of reality upon unreality for its senses, and it now found it could only think of two things:

One, it knew absolutely nothing at all it thought it knew about the man whose home it had invaded . . . nothing except that this fair-skinned and gangly red-headed man, rumpled and disheveled from the interruption of his breakfast, was both capable and willing of destroying it with a thought.

And, two, now that it was in that man's presence, it had found its desire for truth was rapidly shriveling under the specter of imminent demise.

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