Jon Wishes To Always Feel Normal

The rest of the day went surprisingly the same as it always did. Surprisingly, little about Karyn’s life had changed as a result of her accidental wish other than a lot more attention from the school’s male population. Still, Jon could tell she was uncomfortable with the changes to her body. A look of surprise would flash across her face whenever she caught sight of her now long, blonde hair and she tended to walk with a slight hunch, her shoulders drooping from the new weight. Jon had offered to use the stone to make it so that she was felt more comfortable in her body until they could figure out a way to undo the wish, but Karyn resisted.
“I appreciate the thought, Jon,” she’d said when he brought the idea up, “but we before we do something like that we have to make sure the wording is right. Otherwise, I could end up changing something else about myself or even make it so that I’m not even the same person I am now.”
So, the two of them made plans to meet up at Jon’s house after school to work on a solution to her problem and test the limits of the stone. Karyn had some errands to run before she could come over so Jon had a little bit of time to himself. He thought back to how uncomfortable Karyn had seemed all day and, knowing the kinds of wishes he was likely to make, figured it might be a good idea to head those kinds of feelings off at the pass. Karyn was right about getting the wording right, though. No sense risking a drastic change in his life or personality. He just wanted to feel as comfortable and natural in his body as he did now. With that thought in mind he grabbed his notebook and started scribbling different ideas for how to word his wish.
After a while, Jon sat his pen down and looked at what he’d written. “I think this will work,” he said as he picked up the stone. He hesitated for a moment, steeling his nerves, then started. “I wish that any magical changes to my body that I am aware of and do not affect my health or well being will feel as comfortable and normal to me as my body does now and that I will have all the inherent instincts, habits, and abilities that go along with those changes as if I had always had them.”
Jon felt the usual urge to look away, as if he’d seen something moving out of the corner of his eye, and the stone glowed lightly signaling the wish had been granted. He was tempted to test out the effectiveness of his wish but as he started thinking of how to do it he realized that he’d hit on a way to possibly fix the effects of Karyn’s wish. It was so simple he was kicking himself for not thinking of it. Temporary wishes! John was just finishing up the wording to a test wish a few minutes later when he heard a knock at his door.
“Who is it?” he said, stashing the stone in his pocket.
“Me!” he heard call from the other side of the bedroom door.
He jumped up and let Karyn. As he closed the door behind her he was already pulling the stone from his pocket.
“So, I think I have a solution to your…uh, little problem,” he said as he turned to face Karyn.
Karyn had started to plop down on Jon’s bed but managed to somehow catch herself and spin around to face him with a level of grace she’d never be able to repeat intentionally.
“Really? How? I thought wishes were permanent.”
“Well,” Jon said. “First off, wishes aren’t permanent, they just can’t be undone. If we set a time limit for a wish, though, we can’t unwish it while it’s in effect but once the time limit runs out then everything should return to normal. I was just about to start testing to see if it worked when you got here.”
“So test away,” Karyn said.
Jon tore a blank sheet of paper from his notebook and held it up so they could both see it. With his free hand he pulled the stone from his pocket and clutched it tightly.
“I wish that for the next 30 seconds the sheet of paper I’m holding would turn pink with green polka dots.”
Both he and Karyn glanced away briefly, signaling the wish had been granted. As their eyes settled back on the sheet they found it was indeed solid pink with medium sized green dots spread across it. Neither of them said a word as they stared at it. Jon wasn’t sure if he even breathed while they both waited. Thirty seconds later the color seemed to fade from the paper. For the briefest of moments it appeared solid gray then, almost like a lagging film catching up with the audio suddenly, it snapped back to white with blue horizontal lines and a pink vertical line on the left…a standard page of notebook paper.