The Wink That Got Away With Everything

A Kiss With Conditions

Mimsy Vell had been told, in terms too clear to mistake, that the night bloom was not a public kissing booth. She had also been told to keep her little paws off its silver petals, its blue dew, and the enormous mushroom beside it where Keeper Orin Thistle made his rounds. Mimsy remembered every word. Remembering had never been her problem.

The bloom opened once a season, for nine minutes after midnight. Its scent could make an honest creature remember an old crush and a dishonest one remember three. Orin guarded it because the dew gathered on its petals could grant a single small wish. The size of the wish mattered less than its wording. Last year someone had wished for a quiet evening and the entire frog chorus had gone mute until dawn. The frogs had filed a complaint in sixteen parts.

Mimsy perched on her own glowing mushroom, the gills warming her feet, and watched Orin polish the little brass clock he used to time the opening. He was all careful hands, dark velvet vest, and the kind of face that looked as if it had once smiled and then regretted setting a precedent. She had wanted to make him laugh for weeks. She had wanted him to look at her for longer than the time required to say, “Step back from the protected flora.” She had also, privately, wanted to find out whether he kissed as precisely as he counted.

Neither desire would have been a crime. Turning it into a wager in front of half the garden was where the trouble began.

“One kiss,” Mimsy announced from the mushroom cap. “One wish. Before the clock runs out.”

Orin did not look up. “You may submit a written request to admire the bloom.”

“The wager is not about admiring the bloom.”

A moth dropped so suddenly from a leaf that it landed upside down. A beetle near the path made a noise like a bottle being uncorked. Orin lifted his eyes at last, which was almost as satisfying as the kiss might be.

“And what do I receive if you fail?” he asked.

“My best mushroom perch for a month.”

It was a terrible stake. The perch glowed warm amber and gave her the finest view of the garden. Everyone knew she loved it. That was why Orin agreed. He believed a wager with a real cost might finally make her listen to a rule.

He set the terms aloud so the moths could witness them. Mimsy could not touch the bloom or take its dew. She could ask for a kiss, but he must freely agree. If she won the kiss before the bloom closed, he would use its dew to grant one wish she spoke. If she failed, he got the perch. Orin was smug enough to add, “No tricks.”

Mimsy held up both hands. “Define trick.”

“Anything designed to make me do what I would not otherwise choose.”

She narrowed one eye, let the other go wide and blue, and touched the tip of her tongue to her upper lip. Orin's clock slipped half an inch in his hand. From the path came a chorus of appreciative, deeply unhelpful sounds.

“That,” Orin said, recovering the clock, “is very close to a trick.”

“Then you are very close to losing.”

The first silver petal opened. Orin stood beside it and began his count. Mimsy stayed on her mushroom, paws well away from the flower. She told him that she knew he kept the paths clear before rain because the smallest creatures could not climb a fallen stem. She told him she had seen him lift a sleeping snail from the cold side of a stone and set it under a leaf, then check on it at sunrise. His sternness did not fool her. It merely came with better buttons.

Orin missed a count. “You were watching me?”

“More carefully than you were watching the flower.”

He looked from her to the bloom and back. The clock ran on. Mimsy expected an argument. Instead he stepped toward the mushroom, close enough that the amber light warmed his face.

“If I kiss you,” he said, “it will be because I want to.”

“That,” she said softly, “was the only condition I liked.”

What the Flower Heard

Orin climbed onto the mushroom cap. Its amber gills made the buttons of his vest shine. Behind him the night bloom unfolded another petal, and every eavesdropping moth leaned forward as if the garden had paid for seats.

“I would like to kiss you,” he said. It sounded as though he was confessing to misplacing the moon.

Mimsy's practiced grin faltered. She had expected to win by making him flustered. She had not expected the honesty.

“Then do,” she whispered.

He took her paw and pressed his lips to its back. It was a lovely kiss. It was also, to the disappointment of the beetle audience, not the one Mimsy had meant. Orin released her paw with a maddening little smile. “You said one kiss.”

Mimsy looked at him, then at the clock. Five minutes remained. “I did.” She raised her kissed paw. “And you gave me one freely. I win.”

The moth witnesses fluttered in protest. One insisted the spirit of the wager had involved mouths. Another objected that paws were a kind of hand and hands could be terribly suggestive in the right light. Orin, who had written the conditions himself, could not deny the count. The kiss was the loophole, and he had stepped into it on purpose.

“You are impossible,” he said.

“That is not a refusal.”

The bloom opened fully. Silver dew trembled in its center. Orin drew one drop into a glass thimble without breaking a petal, then held it where she could see the faint blue pulse inside. “A small wish,” he reminded her. “Be careful with the verbs.”

She should have listened. She was still flushed by the paw kiss and by the knowledge that he had wanted it. She imagined the garden glowing around them, a whole ridiculous stage on which he might put down his clock and kiss her somewhere less technical. The image was too delicious to inspect.

“I wish every mushroom in the garden would shine like this one until dawn,” she said.

The thimble cracked. Blue light ran along the path and stopped at Orin's boots. The brass clock rang once without being touched. Across the garden, hundreds of dark mushroom caps lifted their rims, waiting.

“Oh,” said Orin.

It was a bad sort of oh.

A silver filament unspooled from the night bloom and wound around his wrist. He tried to set the thimble down, but his hand carried it toward the nearest unlit mushroom. When he touched the cap, it flared gold. The next one waited farther away. Then the next.

“Why are you walking?” Mimsy asked.

“Because the bloom has taken the word ‘every’ seriously.”

Keeper's wishes were different from anyone else's. Orin explained it while his feet moved without his permission. The bloom did not create light from nothing. It required its keeper to lend his own stored warmth, one cap at a time. The glow could last until dawn only if every mushroom was lit before the first paling of the sky. If he failed, the borrowed warmth would return to the bloom all at once, scorching its new petals. It might never open again.

“You knew it could do that?” Mimsy demanded.

“I knew the price of a wish could fall on the person holding the dew.” His voice sharpened. “You made the wish before I could explain the rest.”

That was fair, which made it unbearable. She followed as he touched cap after cap. The garden looked beautiful almost immediately. Gold pools appeared under ferns. Pearly spots floated beneath leaves. The path became an invitation to linger, and Orin could not linger at all.

At the third bed his breath came rough. At the seventh he stopped speaking. Mimsy reached for his wrist, but the filament stung her fingertips. Orin pulled away to spare her another burn and stumbled toward the next cap.

The crowd had thinned. Watching a kiss was entertainment. Watching someone pay for it was less fashionable. Mimsy glared at the departing beetles, then at her own bright perch, visible above the paths like a small private throne. She had wanted him to see her. Now he could barely lift his eyes.

“Tell me how to undo it,” she said.

“A wish can be surrendered by the winner.”

“Then I surrender it.”

Nothing happened. Orin's feet kept moving.

He managed a grim smile. “You must give up what you won. Not only the words. The prize.”

Mimsy looked down at the paw he had kissed. For the first time all night, she had no clever answer.

The Part She Could Not Wink Away

Mimsy was good at giving things away when she did not want them. Broken acorn cups. Advice. Other people's secrets, if those people had been especially tedious. She had never practiced giving up something she treasured because another creature needed her to.

Orin leaned against a stem while the silver filament tugged at him. “The bloom heard our wager,” he said. “It knows your stake. If you renounce the wish and offer the perch, it can use the cap's stored glow instead of mine. The lights will go out. The bloom will live.”

“My perch will grow back?”

“Not this one.”

Its broad cap had held her through hot days and cold rain. From it she could see every path without being seen first. She had made a home of that useful advantage and, tonight, a stage. She looked at Orin's burned wrist. The choice was ugly only because it was real.

“All right,” she said. “Take it.”

Nothing happened.

Orin's eyes met hers. “You cannot say it to me. The bloom needs to hear you.”

Of course it did. A private apology might have saved her pride, and the garden's magic had apparently developed a taste for accountability.

Mimsy climbed her mushroom. She wanted to make a joke about how many creatures had come to watch Orin's mouth and how few had stayed to watch his hands. She did not. She stood on the warm cap, faced the open flower, and spoke loudly enough for the remaining moths to hear.

“I wanted a pretty night and a clever win. I wished before I understood who would have to work for it. I give up the wish. I give up my perch. Let him stop.”

The silver filament loosened from Orin's wrist. All around the garden, the borrowed lights went dark, one bed after another. The glow under Mimsy's feet rose through the cap in a single amber breath. For one heartbeat she could see the whole garden traced in gold: Orin below her, the bloom intact, the moths hovering as if ashamed of having wings.

Then her mushroom folded gently inward. It left a shallow ring of pale soil and a warmth on the soles of her feet that faded before she could decide whether to cry.

Orin caught her when she jumped down. He did not have to. The wager was finished. That was what made it matter.

“Is the bloom safe?” she asked.

He checked its petals and the little brass clock. “Yes.”

“And your wrist?”

“Annoyed.”

“That is usually my role.”

“You have many talents.” His thumb brushed a last speck of amber from her cheek. “Listening may yet become one.”

By dawn the spectators had found their way back, as spectators do once the difficult part is over. Mimsy made them help. The beetles carried fresh moss to the scorched beds. The moths checked the smaller caps that had gone dark. Nobody was allowed to call the night a romantic triumph while Orin still had a blister.

Over breakfast, an elderly snail asked whether Mimsy had lost the wager after all.

“I won it,” Mimsy said. “Then I discovered winning was expensive.”

The snail considered that. “A lesson?”

“Do not make it sound respectable.”

Orin appeared with two cups of dewberry tea. He set one beside her and sat on the ground where her mushroom had stood. With nothing to perch upon, Mimsy had to sit beside him. The view was lower. It was also better.

“I owe you an apology,” she said. “A proper one. I liked the way you looked at me. I turned it into a contest because I was afraid you'd stop if I asked plainly.”

Orin watched the bloom close its last petal. “I liked the way you looked at me too. I hid behind rules because I was afraid I wouldn't.”

“So what happens if I ask plainly now?”

“Try it.”

She took a breath. “Would you kiss me? No wager. No flower. No witnesses with opinions.”

A beetle behind a leaf made an indignant squeak. Orin waved it away without looking. Then he kissed Mimsy on the mouth, with considerably less precision than either of them had expected and considerably more enthusiasm than the garden's regulations addressed.

When they parted, she gave him her most outrageous wink.

“Do not start,” he said, smiling.

“I was going to ask if I may borrow your shoulder. The ground is cold.”

“For how long?”

“Until you write a rule against it.”

Orin pulled her close. He never wrote that rule. The night bloom survived, the mushroom beds recovered, and Mimsy eventually found another perch. She still called her first wager a victory, though she told the story with the expensive part left in. Anyone who asked what her wish had been received a wink and a cup of tea. Anyone who asked what it had cost was shown the pale ring in the soil.