A few minutes later, Ken had the kids hanging out in the living room, waiting for their mom to get back. As he contemplated how on Earth he was going to get Tina to believe this, he pulled the note from his pocket and unfolded it. Something had seemed naggingly familiar about the handwriting, and he wanted a better look. He carefully scrutinized every letter; it was written in a childish scrawly block-print that looked an awful lot like...
He looked up. "Mikey?" he said. His now-oldest son jerked to attention, looking startled. "Y-yeah?" he replied.
"Care to explain why this is in your handwriting?"
Mikey looked surprised. "What?" he said, incredulous. "That can't be right. I didn't write that!"
Ken knew his children well enough to know that Mikey was lying through his teeth. "Bull," he snorted. "How about you tell me the truth?"
All of a sudden Mikey was sweating bullets. Why hadn't he thought to disguise his writing? More importantly, how could he get out of this in one piece? "I...um..." he stuttered, completely lost for words.
Jon, meanwhile, had been putting two and two together. Mikey had written that note? He must've found the stone! While her dad continued to grill the dumbstruck Mikey, Jon slipped out of the room and made a mad dash up to Mikey's bedroom. A minute's searching revealed the stone, hidden rather stupidly in the springs under Mikey's mattress. She snatched it out, clutching it tight as she whispered, "I wish Mikey would be unable to make any more wishes with this stone."
She made her way back downstairs, where Mikey was still hemming and hawing. As her dad began to get angry, Jon held up the stone and shouted, in an imperious-little-girl voice, "I WISH MIKEY WOULD TELL DAD THE TRUTH!"
"Shit!" Mikey hissed, but there was no helping it. Compelled to tell the whole story, Mikey explained to his father about finding Jon's stone that morning, creating the sticky pad, and distributing random notes all around the neighborhood. Jon handed the stone to her father. "Here," she said. "I made it so he can't use it anymore, but I'd probably overdo any punishment I tried to hand out."
Ken smiled. "Good call. We'll get this thing straightened out, don't you worry." He clutched the stone as Mikey looked on sullenly. "Okay. I wish my children were restored to the forms they had before Jon read the post-it."
Nothing happened. He clutched it tighter. "I wish I knew why that didn't work." His shoulders sagged in defeat. "Mikey made a wish that victims of wish notes could not return to normal," he said. Jon sank to the floor with a gasp, while Zoe let out a pained groan.
Tina approached the lamppost. There was a post-it note stuck to it. She pulled it off, read it, and crumpled it up, tossing it into a nearby storm drain as she repeated the words she'd read. "I wish," she mumbled to herself as she walked, "that I would switch genitals with my spouse, whose body would change to match their new genitals." She felt a strange sensation in her groin, but ignored it; she was eager to get home to her husband.
As Ken was listening to his son's angry confession, he felt a brief falling sensation, and his field of view dropped about a foot. He saw his children staring wide-eyed and slack-jawed at him, and looked down at himself, anticipating something major but still unprepared for what he saw. He had the body of a slender petite woman just under five feet tall, in a white blouse and knee-length denim skirt, with long brown hair that hung into his...her field of view.
"Mikey," she said in her new soft soprano, "consider yourself grounded. Indefinitely."
