Jon got home after school and immediately felt a mischievous wave pass over him.
No.
He couldn't.
He shouldn't.
But he would.
Giggling like a syphilitic little troll, Jon retreated to his bedroom, traipsing the whole way. Traipsing in the same way a satyr might traipse in a meadow, full of joy and euphoria. But he wasn't a satyr. And he wasn't in a meadow. He was a troll in a McMansion who was about to lock his bedroom door and make absolutely certain that nobody else could hear him as he whispered into his inheritance.
"I wish that every time Sarah McMillan went to read a book, the contents of said book would entirely transform into Vogon poetry."
Sarah McMillan's house was well over a mile from Jon's, well beyond the range of human hearing and well beyond the range of human vocalization. But still, in the moment that Jon completed that sentence, he could have sworn that he heard a scream in Sarah McMillan's voice, waft faintly through his window.
It wasn't enough.
His giggle evolving into a full-on cackle, Jon struggled to get the next sentence out of his mouth. "I wish that every time Sarah McMillan tried to show Vogon poetry to anyone else, the text in question would revert to whatever the reader should expect from what the book originally was supposed to be."
Jon threw himself onto his bed, buried his face in his pillow, began punching his mattress furiously. This was good. This was too good. But he could never let anyone even suspect that he'd done anything. Gasping for breath, he made a third and final wish for the afternoon: "I wish nobody, not even Karyn Black, would ever suspect that I had anything to do with Sarah McMillan's upcoming apparent derangement."
And then, like the syphilitic troll he was, Jon Gibson grinned.
