This is a fanfic based on Dorin Naga's webcomic, Murry and Lewy: https://murryandlewy.com/

Copyright ©2026 by Dorin Naga

A story set in the world of Murry and Lewy

Characters by Dorin Naga — Story by Joyce Melton

I. The Mermaid

The mermaid was cold. That was the first thing Sondra noticed.

The second thing she noticed was that she was draped across the mermaid like a discarded coat, face-down, soaking wet, and apparently wearing nothing but early morning air and a frog tattoo on her back.

The third thing she noticed was that a busboy had stopped sweeping the restaurant garden patio and was staring at her with his mouth open.

"Good morning," said Sondra. It was nonsense but she said it with authority.

Her voice came out huge. Operatic. It bounced off the stone walls of the garden and rattled the closed umbrellas and probably startled pigeons three blocks away. The busboy took a step back. Sondra sat up, looked down at herself, and took a comprehensive inventory of her situation.

Green. Very green. Green from the top of her abundant hair to the tips of her small, webbed toes. Green the color of a lily pad, of a traffic light telling you to go, of a glass bottle held up to the light. She was also, she determined after a moment, about five foot one, which was several inches shorter than she was used to being, and curved in ways that were entirely new and not unpleasant but definitely surprising at six in the morning in a stranger's fountain.

She had last been Xander Haine. She had last been standing in an after hours club telling a woman named Eboni — to watch who she was talking to. But Eboni turned out to have a friend who was a Haine herself and considerably senior in the family hierarchy.

She had not been standing for long after that.

"Do you," said the busboy carefully, "need a tablecloth?"

"Yes," said Sondra, at a volume that rattled his fillings. "I absolutely do."

*

II. The Family

The Haine family kept an enclave in every major city and a good number of minor ones. The Philadelphia  contingent occupied three floors of an office building and dressed like they were always on their way to something better than wherever they currently were. Sondra showed up at their door wearing a tablecloth tucked like a toga and dripping on the welcome mat.

Her Aunt Meredith looked her up and down for a long moment. "Beth?" she said.

"Obviously," said Sondra.

"I would have guessed because of, frog, well you know. But also, I already heard and you started it."

"I am aware of that."

"Xander, sweetheart—"

"Do not call me that right now." She sighed. “I guess I’m Sondra until….” She trailed off having spotted Meredith’s expression.

Aunt Meredith had the particular talent of people who have seen everything and been surprised by none of it. She poured two cups of coffee, sat down across from Sondra at the kitchen table, and explained the situation in the tone of someone reading from a manual she had memorized long ago. The transformation was thorough. The color was genuine. The future was going to require some adjustment. The family had discussed it.

"And?" said Sondra.

"You bought your own trouble," said Aunt Meredith. "Now you have to furnish it and paint it and pay the rent." She slid a key across the table. "There's an apartment in Trenton. It's yours."

"Trenton," said Sondra.

"Near the water treatment plant. Lovely overflow pond out back."

Sondra stared at the key. The key stared back, small and silver and merciless. “You’re not going to change me back?” she said in an operatic whisper that rattled dishes in the cabinets.

"No one will unless Beth does. This is your life now, Sondra," said Aunt Meredith, not unkindly. She pushed the coffee cup closer. "Drink up. You've got a bus to catch."

*

III. The Brownstone

The apartment was on the second floor of a brownstone that leaned slightly to the left, as if listening for something. The hallway smelled of old wood and something botanical that Sondra couldn't identify. The overflow pond was visible from the bathroom window — a flat grey expanse edged with cattails that looked, in the March light, like the most depressing body of water in New Jersey, which was saying something.

Sondra stood in the middle of her new living room in her tablecloth and turned slowly around. Water stain on the ceiling. Radiator that clanked. Three windows facing the pond. Good acoustics — she could tell from the way her footsteps sounded against the bare floor.

She opened her mouth and sang a single long note. It filled the room, rolled out into the hallway, and presumably continued for some distance. Somewhere down the hall someone knocked on a wall. She wasn't sure if it was complaint or approval.

She touched the peeling wallpaper and it went green. A nice deep forest green, as it turned out. She touched the radiator — green. The kitchen cabinets — green. She stood back and looked at the cabinet handles, which were now a perfect pale sage, and felt for the first time since the fountain that morning something that was almost satisfaction.

"Right," she said to no one. "Fine."

She went to find a thrift store.

*

The building had six units and more personalities than that. In 1A there was a man named Brandon Barlow who was thin and intense and kept his door propped open while he worked, which meant you could see his current painting from the hall. It was enormous: a Philadelphia street scene, a parade, the Liberty Bell visible above a crowd of tiny heads, rendered in thousands of individual dots of color. It had been in progress, Sondra learned from the woman in 1B, for two years.

The woman in 1B was the one who had knocked on the wall when Sondra sang. Her name was Deenie and she sold supplements online, mostly to people who had given up on doctors but not on capsules. She was forty-something, extremely enthusiastic, and the first person in the building to look at Sondra and see not a problem but a possibility.

"You can turn things green?" said Deenie, on approximately the second day.

"Only green," said Sondra. "Not very useful."

"I have seventeen gallons of prune juice," said Deenie, "that I cannot move because nobody wants to admit they need it."

There was a pause.

"If it were green," said Deenie, "I could call it a veggie elixir."

"It would still be prune juice."

"Green prune juice."

"That is not a different thing than prune juice."

"To the right customer," said Deenie serenely, "it absolutely is."

She was not wrong. Within a week the veggie elixir had a waiting list. Sondra received a small percentage of each sale and tried not to think about what this said about her life.

*

IV. The Sneeze

March in New Jersey is a complicated month, weather-wise. The trees can't make up their minds and the pollen responds to their indecision by being everywhere at once. Sondra discovered this on a Thursday.

She was standing in the kitchen making coffee when the tickle started. She recognized it dimly — she'd had allergies as Xander, nothing dramatic, just the occasional inconvenience. She reached for her coffee. The tickle built. She set the coffee down. The tickle became an inevitability.

She sneezed.

What happened next took a moment to process. The first thing she was aware of was that she had considerably more in front of her than she had started the morning with. Considerably more. K-cup more. Bigger than her own head more, distributed in a way that her center of gravity found extremely objectionable.

"What," said Sondra.

She looked down. She looked up. She took a careful breath. She did not, she decided with great intensity of purpose, sneeze again.

She lasted forty-five minutes. Then a second cloud of pollen drifted through the open window and that was that.

She woke up in the overflow pond as a frog. A small green frog, roughly the size of a tennis ball, sitting on a lily pad in the grey March dawn. One of the cattails was waving in the breeze. A duck regarded her without interest.

"Ribbit," said Sondra, with great feeling.

She spent the night in the pond as instructed by some deep biological knowledge she had not asked for and turned back to herself at sunrise. Her green frog-girl self, that is, standing knee-deep in cold water with no clothes — they had, it turned out, vanished with the transformation — and a great deal to say about everything.

She said it, at length and at volume, to no one in particular. The duck had left.

*

She found her cousin Gerald at a Haine family card game in Atlantic City after another bus ride, paid for by the casinos who subsidized the Philly and Trenton runs to the gambling mecca. Gerald was the youngest of the Covenant branch, nineteen and apologetic by nature, and the only family member she had any real hope of appealing to.

She sat down across from him, still damp, wearing a bathrobe she had found hanging by the back door of the brownstone — someone, bless them, had anticipated this eventuality — and explained the situation in full.

Gerald listened. Gerald winced. Gerald's hand of cards slowly wilted.

"The — the whole two-stage thing?" he said.

"The whole two-stage thing, Gerald."

"I mean technically Beth only—"

"Gerald."

"Right."

He fixed it that evening. It took twenty minutes and cost him a minor headache. The transformation now went directly to frog, no intermediate stage, no burlesque revue detour. It was the single act of family charity Sondra would receive, and she had earned every syllable of it.

She thanked him. He looked surprised. She was too, a little.

*

V. Bindle

She had been in Trenton for three weeks when she encountered the hot dog situation.

It was a good hot dog — or it had been, before it was in the hands of a small retreating figure who had grabbed it off her paper plate while she was reading a sign on a telephone pole and was currently disappearing around the corner of Broad Street at considerable speed.

Sondra's brain said: that child stole your lunch, let it go, it is not worth it.

Sondra's tongue had already gone.

It was faster than she expected. It was also considerably less accurate than she would have predicted, and it wrapped around the head of her retreating thief with what she would later describe as an iron grip and what everyone else would describe as the most alarming thing they had seen on Broad Street that week, which was competitive.

They both froze. She’d been aiming at the hot dog.

The kid was — small. Smaller than Sondra, and she was not large. He looked about twelve, though she would find out later he was sixteen and simply built for a different century. He had a rolled bundle of bedding and clothing tied to his back, a hot dog in his right hand, and the expression of someone who had made a miscalculation.

Sondra opened her mouth to explain herself. No explanation came out, because her tongue was occupied.

The kid ate the hot dog. There was nothing else to do. He ate it slowly, with the focus of someone who has learned not to let good food go to waste regardless of circumstances, and Sondra stood on the sidewalk making urgent muffled noises while pedestrians flowed around them like water around a very small and very green rock.

They stood there for half an hour.

When her tongue finally released him — with the reluctance of a closing parenthesis — the kid wiped his face thoughtfully and looked at her.

"That your tongue?" he said.

"Yes," said Sondra, at full volume, startling a nearby pigeon into flight.

"Huh." He thought about this. "I'm Bindle."

"Sondra."

"You live around here?"

"Unfortunately."

"Cool," said Bindle. He picked up his bundle. "You got good taste, by the way."

She stared at him. She wasn’t the one who had been being tasted.

"The hot dog," he said. "Good choice. Mustard, pepper relish, no ketchup. Classic." He gave her what appeared to be a sincere nod of approval and walked away.

Sondra stood on the sidewalk and tried to think of anything to say. Nothing came. It was, all things considered, a new experience.

*

He turned up again, as she was beginning to understand he would. On her fire escape one morning. On the stoop when she came back from buying new clothes at the Goodwill — she'd had to replace the whole outfit again, a frog incident, she didn't want to talk about it. Once more, she found him sitting on the railing of her balcony when she came out to take in the evening air, eating something he had apparently found somewhere, looking at the pond at the end of the alley.

She didn't invite him in. She didn't tell him to leave. There were, without planning or discussion, a blanket and an old pillow on the balcony that had not been there before. It was nobody's business how they got there.

"You like me," said Bindle one evening, with great confidence.

"I tolerate you," said Sondra.

"Because I have good taste."

She made a face. "Go to sleep," she said loudly because she said everything loudly.

He went to sleep, apparently perfectly comfortable on a balcony in Trenton in April, which said things about him that Sondra filed away and did not examine too closely.

*

VI. The Pepper

It was Bindle who figured out the pepper solution, which was either the best or worst thing he ever did depending on how you counted the costs.

It happened during the runaway stroller incident. There had been a stroller, moving at speed down a hill, unattended, emitting sounds of distress. Sondra had, without pausing to think — which was largely how she operated — intercepted it.

The stroller contained a French bulldog in a baby bonnet who stared up at her with enormous eyes and blew a small bubble.

Her tongue had already decided how it felt about this; it was wrapped around the miniature bulldog’s head and would not let go.

She was standing on the sidewalk with a French bulldog attached to her tongue when the dog's owner arrived, assessed the situation with breathtaking inaccuracy, and began threatening to call the police. The dog made small gremlin noises. Sondra made larger but equally inarticulate noises. Bindle, who had been there for the whole thing, was bent double against a parking meter.

"Do something," Sondra communicated to him, through the medium of extremely expressive eyebrows.

Bindle, still laughing, dug through his pockets. He had been thinking about the tongue problem for some time. He had a theory.

He held the pepper shaker under her nose.

Sondra sneezed.

The French bulldog landed on its feet, shook itself, and trotted back to its owner, who stared at the small green frog now sitting on the pavement where a small green woman had been. Bindle picked up the frog with some care. The frog looked up at him with an expression of absolute and specific fury.

"Sorry," said Bindle. "It worked, though."

The frog said nothing. The frog was going to have a great deal to say in approximately twelve hours.

He carried her to the overflow pond in his bindle, which was large enough if you arranged things carefully. He sat on the bank for a while to make sure she found a good spot — she settled on a lily pad at the far end of the pond and sat there looking outraged, which was, he was learning, a state she could maintain for considerable periods — and then he went back to the brownstone and left a robe and the flip flops on her back doorstep.

He was back in the morning when she turned up at the building's back entrance, wrapped in the robe, hair wet, barefoot, carrying the flip flops.

"That," said Sondra, at the volume she usually reserved for important announcements, "was the worst solution to a problem I have ever experienced."

"You're welcome," said Bindle.

"I spent the night in a pond."

"Better than the alternative."

She stared at him. He looked back with the patience of someone who had slept on worse than balconies and knew how to wait.

"He now carries a pepper shaker at all times," she said, to nobody, in the tone of a woman narrating her own disaster.

"Two, actually," said Bindle, and held up a backup.

She went upstairs to find something to wear.

*

VII. The Painting

She had been living in the brownstone for about six weeks when the painting incident occurred. She wanted it noted, for the record, that it was an accident, that she had not touched the painting on purpose, and that she had in fact been trying to touch the wall, which was a completely different thing.

Brandon Barlow had left his door open, as usual. The hallway was narrow, as usual. Sondra was carrying a box of dishes she had found at the Salvation Army, which was wider than she had remembered when she was navigating a narrow hallway, and the box clipped the doorframe and she put out a hand to catch herself and the hand found the painting.

About an eighth of it, in the upper left corner. The sky over the Liberty Bell.

Which went green.

She stared at it. Barlow was not in the apartment — he had gone to get lunch — but she was aware that she had perhaps thirty seconds to do something useful before she had to decide whether to confess or run. She looked at the green patch. She looked at the rest of the painting. She thought about leaving.

She touched the painting again.

She told herself later that she had been trying to blend it back in somehow. That she had thought she might fix it. She was not sure she believed herself. The truth was that the green had looked good against all those careful dots, and her hand had moved without much consultation from higher authority.

She stepped back when she was done. The painting was entirely green. A thousand shades of it — viridian and sage and jade and forest and lime and the deep impossible green of the pond at midsummer. All those thousands of dots, in every green that existed, the parade still moving through the streets of Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell still hanging above the crowd, the whole scene luminous and strange and undeniably striking.

"What," said Brandon Barlow, from the doorway, "have you done to my painting."

It was not, technically, a question.

Sondra explained. Barlow went through several phases, rapidly, including fury, devastation, a complicated middle stage she could not entirely categorize, and something that looked almost like wonder. Then he stood very still and looked at his painting for a long time.

"Get out," he said finally, not with particular heat. "I need to think."

She got out.

Three weeks later, he sold it for more money than he had ever seen at one time. The buyer was a gallery owner who described it in the press release as "a radical meditation on ecological grief and civic memory." Barlow called Sondra at eleven o'clock on the night he found out, which she understood to be a communication of some kind, and said nothing for about ten seconds, and then said: "I still want to strangle you."

"I know," said Sondra.

"You can't just—"

"I know."

Another pause.

"It looks good," he said, grudgingly.

"I know," said Sondra.

He hung up. She could hear, from down the hall, him opening a bottle of something celebratory. Every other artist in the building had been watching her nervously ever since.

*

VIII. The Green Frog

She walked past the sign on a Tuesday evening in May.

THE GREEN FROG, it said, in letters that were trying their best. LIVE MUSIC THURS-SAT. NOW SEEKING VOCALIST.

Sondra stood on the sidewalk and looked at the sign for a while. The sign was not green. She considered making it green and decided against it on the grounds that she had enough complications.

She went in.

The bar was small and dark and smelled of beer and ambition in roughly equal proportions. The owner — a large, tired-looking man named Fortunato who had bought the place three years ago on the theory that Trenton was due for a revival and was still waiting — looked up from his inventory when she walked in.

He looked at her. She looked at him.

"I'm here about the vocalist thing," said Sondra.

"We don't have a stage," said Fortunato, who had clearly learned to open with this. "Just a cleared corner."

"Fine."

He gestured at the cleared corner. She walked to it, turned around, and sang the opening of "Habanera" at him, because it was in her head and she had no filter.

The glasses behind the bar vibrated slightly. Fortunato gripped the counter. A man who had been asleep in the back booth woke up and looked around, confused and moved.

"Thursday through Saturday," said Fortunato, when she finished. "Twenty percent of the bar take. You pick your own sets."

"I want a dressing room."

"It's a broom closet."

"I want the brooms out of it."

"Done."

"And my name on the sign."

"What's your name?"

She thought about this for a moment. Sondra Haine was a name she was still breaking in, like new shoes, and she hadn't fully decided how it fit. What she needed for a sign outside a bar called The Green Frog was something else.

Something slightly ridiculous. Something memorable. Something that said: yes, I know, and I've decided to enjoy it.

"Bobbie Ribbit," she said.

Fortunato wrote it down without blinking. She suspected he had heard worse.

She told Bindle about it that evening. He laughed for so long she zooked the pepper shaker off the kitchen counter out of principle, and then stood there holding it with her tongue for five minutes while he recovered.

"Bobbie Ribbit," he said again, when he could talk.

She zooked a dish towel.

"Bobbie Ribbit."

She stood with a dish towel and a pepper shaker both attached to her tongue and tried to project dignity. It was, under the circumstances, a limited success.

*

IX. The Moth

Summer came to Trenton gradually, the way things do when they're not entirely welcome but have nowhere else to be. The overflow pond went from grey to green and back to grey depending on the light, and the cattails grew three feet and then four, and Sondra bought a window box and filled it with plants and turned them all the same shade of deep green and decided she liked it.

She played her first three sets at The Green Frog and received, in order: a standing ovation from a table of women celebrating a birthday, a noise complaint from the building next door, and a write-up in the Trenton paper that described her as "an astonishing vocal talent of uncertain provenance." Fortunato taped it to the bar.

She sang everything. Standards and blues and the kind of jazz that made people stop talking. She scatted when the spirit moved her, which was often. She wore green, which was all she had, and stood in the cleared corner in her bare flat feet and filled the room until people in the back could feel it in their chests.

Deenie's veggie elixir had acquired a second flavor. Barlow had started a new painting. The building had collectively decided that Sondra was their particular liability and their particular asset, and that on balance this was fine.

She checked on Bindle the way she checked on all the things she had decided not to admit she cared about: indirectly, at an angle, while appearing to be doing something else.

He was on the balcony, asleep on his bindle with the blanket pulled up, which meant it had been a harder day and he'd needed somewhere familiar. She stood in the doorway and looked at him for a moment. Sixteen, she reminded herself. Looked twelve. Slept like the dead, the sleep of someone who had learned to rest whenever rest was available and not waste it on consciousness.

A moth came in from the dark, drawn by the interior light, and landed on his face.

Sondra's brain said: leave it. It's just a moth. Go back inside.

Sondra's tongue had already gone.

The iron grip closed. The moth, she was dimly aware, had escaped. She was now standing on her balcony in the warm Trenton night attached to the head of a sleeping street kid who would, if he woke up, reach for the pepper shaker without a second thought.

She was very still. She concentrated very hard on not sneezing.

Bindle slept.

The pond was silver in the moonlight. Somewhere on it, a frog sang one long sustained note, and somewhere further on another answered, and the night arranged itself around the sound. Sondra stood in it, barefoot, green, ridiculous, stuck.

She'd been checking on him. She couldn't say so. That was fine. She had, she was discovering, a talent for caring about things she couldn't say.

She waited for morning.

*

END

— Sondra Haine appears in the world of Murry and Lewy by Dorin Naga : https://murryandlewy.com/

Copyright ©2026 by Dorin Naga

Parts of this post were AI assisted, including the image being done by Venice.ai