The jasmine flower did what it was meant to do. As the water embraced it, its petals loosened, unfurling in slow, delicate spirals, stretching as though waking from a dream. Wisps of fragrance curled into the air, sweet, fleeting, impossibly light. Alice watched as the transformation unfolded in her cup, a quiet kind of magic. An awakening that whispered, rather than announced itself, simply becoming.
She lifted the porcelain to her lips, inhaling the scent before taking the first sip. The warmth slid down her throat, blooming from the inside. But something in the air shifted. A ripple, as if the world itself had exhaled.
The newspaper beside her blinked, if paper could blink. The ripple passed through the pages, like a dress caught in a soft breeze. Letters loosened, dissolving, then reforming elsewhere, sentences slipping into new shapes before her eyes. Ink pulsed-first words, then images, landscapes, and figures she almost recognized. Or had always known. She reached for the paper, but it was not a newspaper at all. Not anymore. The edges of her vision blurred, colors deepening as if the world had taken a slow breath and let itself sink. The chair beneath her softened; the floor, lighter than mist, gave way like clouds kissed by morning light. The sky stretched into pastels, lavender skies, peach-hued clouds, a blush-pink horizon unspooling like silk. Reality did not break or dissolve, only bent, folded, expanded, as gentle and certain as the jasmine flower in her tea.
She stood now in a vast, color shifting land where everything made sense until it didn’t, and nothing was real until it was questioned.