Ever steal a daisy from your grandmother’s flowerbed and start plucking it to pieces to see if the object of your affection loved you back?
“He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not” is the pre-Magic 8 Ball predictor of happily-ever-afters, wherein one chants the positive and negative outcome while eviscerating unsuspecting dainty blooms and thereby robbing bees of a source of nutrition.
Unless you count the petals before you start, you won’t know your fate until the last few delicate bits remain. If you reach the last petal with a less-than-desirable outcome (c’mon, we already know before we kill the flower which way we want the wind to blow), you simply steal another daisy and try again. Perhaps this one will have the odd or even petal configuration needed to obtain the desired future.
Or you fudged the game a bit and “didn’t count” that petal with the brown tip, the wilty petal, or the one that didn’t quite develop as heartily as the others. In this way, you could save a flower—along with the poor bee’s breakfast—and still get that peace of mind you were searching for.
The nerd in me wondered how long this practice had been around. Quite possibly since the Middle Ages, it turns out. And France is often credited as the country of origin, so far as I can tell.
France tracks. Love and romance and all.
Other cultures have used different phrases. A Russian grandmother supposedly added a third option to the roulette: He will spit upon me. I suppose that tracks, too.
I’ve just taken a break from the novel-in-progress, partly because I need to stretch and partly because I’m stuck. Again. Fighting brain fog and whithering wherewithal.
I’m puttering around in the kitchen doing the “will it be a banana or will it be a box of bonbons” dance when I hear sharp tocks coming from the writing office.
More like, snap, mumble, mumble, thock, mumble, mumble, plink, mumble, mumble.
Three cats have whizzed by me in all directions with their hides bushed and their ears laid back. All of them had been in kitty comas on the pink plush cat tree moments before I left the desk.
I go around the corner to find Little Miss Muse sitting criss-cross on the office floor, a giant pile of nail polish bottles—all in various shades of purple—at her side. Several are scattered across the room.
“She loves me,” Little Miss mumbles and tosses the bottle across the floor. Clank. “She loves me not.” Another bottle spins near my feet. I stop her before she can pick up another.
“What are you doing?”
“Seeing the future.”
“Future?”
“Whether or not we will continue to have a working relationship past this manuscript.” She sticks her nose in the air and reaches to her side for another bottle.
I see what’s happening here. A Little Miss Muse temper tantrum.
“I’m working on it.” I correct myself. “We’re working on it.” I pull up the document. Words are piling up. It’s looking like a draft.
Little Miss flicks the bottle across the floor. “She loves me,” she says flatly and reaches for another.
I scan where I left off in the scene. I need… something. A device. A thread. A MacGuffin. Something… But I’m stuck.
With a huff, “She loves me NOT” is accompanied by another whisk of a bottle; this time, it hits the side of my socked foot.
“Ouch!” I gather up all the bottles into my hoodie, each one a bribe or offering or a “wooing” of my insatiable muse.
“You wouldn’t be so stuck.” She eyes the dab of chocolate on my finger. “And you wouldn’t need nearly so many bonbons if you’d just pay attention to me.” She stomps over, rescues her bottles, and adds them back to the pile.
I point out what she just did as I lick the chocolate off. “You just altered the outcome.”
“Maybe.” She flits back to the screen and opens two documents (the first two novels in the trilogy) and one scene from the current nightmare—I mean work-in-progress. She mumbles something about “doing everything around here…”, enters something in the search bar, and sits back next to her bottle pile.
In rapid fire, as fast as her chubby arms can fling them, the nail polish bottles come sliding and clanking across the floor. “Loves me, loves me not. Loves me, loves me not.”
“Okay! Stop!” Her arm freezes in mid-air, and the “not” bottle makes it all the way out to the hallway. I shake the ringing from my ears and glance at the screen.
Little Miss Muse has pulled up daisies in all three manuscripts. Some instances are subtle mentions.
One not-so-subtle.
Now images for the storyline fall like dominoes, and I can see where to go.
I step over the mess of bottles and slump into the chair. I smile at Little Miss and nod.
She slumps against the bookcase, feigning to wipe sweat from her brow, and ceremoniously tosses the last bottle across the room. “She loves me.”
I rub my temples, willing the headache to ease. “Yes. I love you. But next time you want to play this game, maybe let me know and I’ll buy you a bouquet of daisies.” Much quieter, daisy petals are. It’ll be tuna time in the furthest time zone before any of the cats come out of hiding.
“Make them purple and it’s a deal.”
And purple they shall be, lest Little Miss Muse add a third option. “She loves me. She loves me not. She shall be tarred and feathered.”
