Classic Rock Bands One-shots

Froger and Maylor: Daffodils and Us

Drip, drip, drip.

The sound of the rain, seeping in through the ceiling of the small shack she called home, was keeping Melina awake all night. She sighed and rolled over, pulling the sheets above her head in a half-hearted attempt to drown out the sound. It was no use. With every minute that passed the dripping only got louder, more persistent. It was as if the rain knew how exhausted she was, not letting her sleep only to spite her.

Working two jobs just to be able to pay the bills wasn’t exactly what she would call ideal, having to give up her studies as a result was even less so. It wasn’t ideal but it was definitely necessary. It was the only way she could keep her and her father afloat. Nothing had been the same since her mother passed away, almost two years ago. Her father definitely wasn’t.

She could hear him now, his snores drifting down the corridor and through her worn wooden door. He wouldn’t wake until the following afternoon, comatose on the sofa after his rendezvous with a bottle of whiskey, no doubt dribbling all over her mother's favourite red cushions. It was a night not unlike most.

The clock on her nightstand read 03:08am and Melina made the mental calculations: just under five hours before she needed to be back at work, plastering on fake smiles for her boss who had what could only be described as a very limited sense of personal boundaries. Still, he was her favourite of the two, with her other boss feeling an incessant need to rip into her during every shift, simply for the purpose of amusement. Melina Bulsara certainly didn’t find it funny.

With a heavy heart, Melina closed her eyes again, trying to push the emerging sense of dread away with thoughts of the one good thing in her otherwise drab life it was him. She thought of his eyes, blue as the sky on a warm summer’s day, twinkling like a thousand stars in the night as he smiled at her. And that smile.. his smile..lt was enough to brighten her heart on even the darkest of days.

She couldn’t believe he’d chosen her, Melina Bulsara, out of all the girls in the world. She couldn’t see her appeal, honestly. She was excruciatingly ordinary, with drab ebony hair that fell limply to her shoulders; it sometimes curled, warm brown eyes that had faded over time, now as dull as the old scratched wood lining her bedroom floor.

“Your heart,” he’d told her one Friday evening as he walked her home from work,  “Yours is the purest of hearts I’ve ever known.” She’d rolled her eyes and scoffed at his words, ignoring the tell-tale blush that coated her cheeks. He’d noticed, of course, and smiled a smile that made her heart flutter. Then, he’d plucked a single daffodil from a garden as they’d passed, presenting it to her before kissing her cheek goodbye. That was the last time she’d seen him.

The daffodil now sat in a vase on her windowsill, wilted and dying, a new petal falling to the ground with each day that passed without him. She tried not to let herself feel downhearted. She knew he had to travel for work and that he would return for her once again, as he had the time before and the time before that. Two more days to go and he would be back again, as promised. Along with his strong work ethic, he was kind, funny, considerate, honestly, he was too good to be true. Yet there he had been at the other end of the bar on the night Melina had gone to collect her father from the local pub, ready to help when she’d cut herself on a stealthy piece of broken glass. It had been hiding atop the bar, likely leftover from a pint glass her father had lost his grip on.

She hadn’t known him long – three weeks, to be precise – but already she knew he was the one she was going to marry. Perhaps they would even have children, maybe two or three, and live in a house built from laughter and love. The front door would be painted red, surrounded by a bed of daffodils that would bloom each summer for the rest of their lives.