The Awakening

"Darn these mosquitoes!" she mumbled to herself, flinging her pen onto her notepad and hauling herself off the couch. Slipping into her blue carpet slippers, she stepped to the window and thrust her arm out to pull the window shut. "And I'm going to make short work of this thing one of these days", she muttered darkly, as a thorn from the rose plant on the window sill scratched her bare arm. Again. Glaring balefully, first at the plant and then at her notepad, she sighed. As if it wasn't bad enough that she couldn't, for the life of her, think of a decent script, she fumed. The Head of the Department didn't just trust and encourage her to produce the best script the film school had ever seen - he had practically bulldozed her into it. The expectations were getting to her. It was very unfair, she thought, not sure what she meant by "it".

Irritated and worn out, she cast a glance at the window sill. Stupid rose plant, she decided. Why was it taking forever to bloom? When she had admired her friend Pat's beautiful pink roses, Pat had all but bullied her into taking home a cutting. Everyone gets their way with me, she sulked to herself. And here was this rose plant, resolutely refusing to blossom even three months later; serving no purpose, even ornamental; only getting in the way when she wanted to shut and open the windows, and demanding to be watered twice a day.

Heading to her kitchenette, she began rummaging in her shelves for coffee and sugar.

Two weeks later, she presented her Head with her script. Because the subject was close to her heart, she had put in every last bit of effort. As the Head ran his eyes down the first page, she crossed her fingers hopefully behind her back.

The Head had been curt. No, this wasn't good enough. It wasn't even good.

Back home, eyes burning and tears choking her, she shredded the script into a hundred pieces. It didn't matter...nothing mattered, she thought, looking around to see where she could stuff the script so she would never have to see it again. Spotting the rose plant on the window sill, she walked up to it and savagely pushed the crumpled ball of paper into the very depths of the soil. Angry, hurt and lonely, she flung herself onto the couch.

She opened her eyes to a million dust particles dancing in the ray of sunlight that slanted straight across the room and onto her face. She felt strangely at peace. As sleep left her little by little, the previous evening flashed before her eyes, and even though she had been the only spectator to her tantrum, she felt silly and ashamed of herself. Of course she could do better than that, she thought. She could - she would - write a better script.

Wide awake and very hopeful, she took a deep breath and went up to the window to open it and let the sunshine in. Two steps short of the sill, she stopped dead.

There, on a stem of the plant that faced the sun directly, was a little, pinkish-orange rosebud.