Snowdrops

by Rosie de la Mare

Many years ago, Mrs Droop had set herself a task: to tend to the snowdrops that appeared annually in the flowerbeds bordering the patch of grass in front of her dingy council flat. Snowdrops are for life and Mrs Droop wanted them to outlive her.

She loved seeing the hoods pushing through the late winter snows, and then wake up at dawn one morning to see the drops had appeared. Some years the flowers would show before Christmas and Mrs Droop would just stand by her sink, mug of coffee in hand, and stare out at them. For her they represented purity.

But this evening she had watched young Davey Brown ripping a handful of her precious flowers and shoving them in Donna White’s face, saying “’ere Don? Fancy a shag?”

And so Mrs Droop set herself another task.She would add more colour to her flowerbeds and watch the local youth bloom.


Rosie de la Mare lives in West London and discovered two years ago that writing flash fiction was a brilliant outlet for all the weird thoughts and sentences that wake her up in the middle of the night.