the beige kettle

(originally posted 4/22/2013)

If anyone wanted a cup of tea now was the time. The kettle sat fuming, the water contained within it was almost at a boil and yet the stove wasn’t even on. It tried, unsuccessfully, to maintain an air of quiet dignity but after the comments from the pot it just wasn’t possible.

The kettle was beige. The box it had arrived in had clearly stated that.

That damn pot, black as the ace of spades, running its mouth.

Sure, the kettle wasn’t eggshell white like some of the kettles in the Farberware Classics line were, but it sure as hell wasn’t black. Only a fool or a pot would say such a thing.

The dishes were in an uproar and the kettle could feel the start of a good whistling coming on. It had to calm down. It couldn’t let the pot, or the dishes for that matter, know that the comment was upsetting it. It wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

The kettle just wished that the pot would keep its enormous round opening, which for the sake of this story will act as its mouth, shut for a change.

The kettle, in its various forms, had been around. From its birth via fusion in a high-mass star to the smelting and forging that went into it becoming a kettle it had seen some things. It knew black.

Not the painted on black either. It knew depths-of-space black.

And it wasn’t black.

It had known many black ones and had never had a reason to think ill of them as a sub-set of kettles but facts are facts and it wasn’t black.

Let the dishes think what they wanted, the silverware on the other hand should know better.

As should that loudmouthed pot.