"I don't know why Mom won't change back," Mikey pleaded. "Please, you've got to help me, Karyn."
Karyn looked up from the ground into the young boy's face. Then, she looked back down at her legs...now her tail. "I don't know, Mikey," she told him, looking back at him. "Ever since you've given yourself the power to change women, you're just too dangerous to be around. I mean, look at me. Look at your mother." She pointed to the baby on the ground a few feet away. Suddenly, a loud scream came over the fence. "Not to mention poor Mrs. Higgins over there," she added.
"What about Sarah?" Mikey asked.
That brought Karyn to a stop. She looked to the street in front of Mikey's house, where she could just see the fire hydrant that Mikey had turned the cheerleader into. "Yes," she said with a sigh, "even Sarah." She turned back to the boy. "The problem is, Mikey, that your power is tuned to what you say. Say I'm a piggie bank, and I become one. Or a drinking fountain. Or a statue."
"I didn't mean to do that," he told her quickly. "It was an accident."
"I know that..."
"It was just something my dad used to say," Mikey continued.
"I understand..."
"He'd say, 'That Karyn. She's solid as a rock'," Mikey explained.
"Mik...!" Karyn tried to call out, but it was too late. As Mikey said the words, she felt that same heavy feeling spread throughout her body. In just a few seconds, she was back to being a statue.
"Oops," Mikey said, as he watched Karyn's latest transformation. He'd done it again, only this time, Karyn was a stone mermaid instead of a girl. "I'm sorry, Karyn" he said, peering into the girl's frozen face. Her head was at an upward angle so that she could look at him, and her lips were parted in her plea to the boy. There was something about her that looked familiar to Mikey.
Then, he realized what it was. Karyn looked like one of those stone mermaids he'd seen at the boring garden his class had visited that time. Only they were in a fountain in the center of the garden. Karyn wasn't. The image made him giggle, though. He pointed at Karyn and said, "Be a fountain."
Unable to do much else, Karyn had just been waiting for Mikey to return her to normal. When she had seen him point at her, she was sure that was what he was going to do. But when he said something about a fountain, she knew that she was stuck, and was going to be until Mikey realized what he was doing again.
Unable to look down, Karyn could only feel herself raising upward. She couldn't see the low pedestal that formed under her, or the stone basin that she was now in the center of. Water filled the basin, and a few moments later, Karyn felt a pressure building up inside her. It was like she had to go pee, but it was moving up instead of down. A second later, she saw a single plume of water rush forth from her lips, arcing in front of her, before falling back down into the basin below.
Mikey had done it...she was a fountain.
