Page 27 of Hexual Healing

“When next you sleep, I'll hex your hair,

Turn it pink with flowers there.

This isn't funny, this is bad,

I sound completely fucking mad!”

Gary was now laughing so hard, he was crying.Actual tears were coming from his eye stalks.“Please, please keep talking.This is the best thing ever.”

“Gary, shut your slimy face,

Or I'll hex you to a different place.

One with salt and no escape,

You'll shrivel like a tiny grape!”

“She's threatening me in iambic pentameter,” Gary wheezed.“I'm being linguistically assaulted by a walking sonnet.”

“Tetrameter,” Baz corrected without a second thought as he slowly approached, hands up like he was trying to trap a wild animal.Which was fair enough.

“How do we fix this?”he asked.

I opened my mouth to answer and quickly shut it again, shaking my head violently.

“You might have to keep talking to break it,” he said gently.“Some reversals require verbal components.”

I glared at him, then sighed:

“To break this hex, I need to find,

The opposite of rhythmic bind.

Speak backward, maybe, or in prose,

But everything just rhymes and flows.”

“Try singing,” Gary suggested, because he was evil.

If he were a human, I’d be going to jail for assault right about now, but unfortunately, the suggestion took hold.I opened my mouth and out came:

“I'm cursed to rhyme and now to sing,

This magical disaster thing,

Has turned me to a Broadway show,

Please kill me now before I go,

Into a full choreographed number,

What a horrible f’ing blunder!”

I even did jazz hands at the end.Completely voluntary jazz hands.

“Okay,” Baz said, clearly fighting laughter.“That's enough.Come here.”

He pulled me against him, and the contact shocked the hex like a reset button.The rhyming stopped.The urge to burst into song faded.