Well for the longest time, Karen discovered she wasn't going to do much. Well, really, it was only twenty minutes--but you try being an immovable object sometime!
Traffic moved, Karen didn't. Clouds moved, Karen didn't. People walked by and waved, Karen fondly remembered having legs and waved back. A dog attempted to mark Karen as its territory. It didn't work out for the pooch. Disgusted and freaked out, Karen tried pointing the water jet that issued from her mouth at it. The dog happily took a drink from while Karen rolled her eyes. Then it sidled up to her and lifted its leg.
Adrenalin rose and Karen frantically waved her arms and made shouting noises that her spew strangled--and then almost with a sensation of vomiting, her calm arc of water became a water cannon that shot out and hit the dog, knocking it over!
'Wow' Karen watched the yipping canine flee across the yard. 'You could knock me over with a feather...Or maybe a bulldozer.
'O' cool! The water level's way down. Must've emptied the pool when I scared the dog off.' But she could feel her roots going to work, and after a half hour, she was pumping full force.
Just when Karen thought despair over her situtation would overwhelm her, she had a cheerful visitor. She thought she'd seen a bird flitting just at the limits of her vision and pursed her lips to send the water away from the bright chested song bird as it preened its feathers and frolicked. Without the jet coming straight out of her mouth to disturb it, she turned her head and got a better view of it.
The nevermind the stone, being a statue, or anything else that had happened to her in her young years--then she got the shock of her life. The chirping bird was stepping around in the water daintily and singing its heart out, when a patch in Karen's pool opened up beneath the bird, and like a toilet flushing the bird was suddenly swallowed up!
Karen reached out and beat on the bottom of her pool, which just felt weird, and tried to find the aperture that had swallowed the cute birdie. She felt things moving forcefully within her, and when the jet from her mouth was tinted strongly red for a few seconds, she gave up and wept. She couldn't even cry like a human, because she could feel the teardrops were spurts of water from her throats, like reverse gulps that welled up from around her eyes. Gradually, the blood was filtered from the pool, and the slight hunger she'd been trying to ignore abated.
Despair returned with a vengeance.
