‘Tis the season

Jonathan Elie walked into the dining room of his semi-subterranean home stretching his arms before him with conscious delight. It was good to have arms during the festive season. Maybe there had been a Jesus after all.

It was Christmas Day and all eight of the remaining family were there at the dining table including himself. His wife, Lena, the twins, his father, her mother aunt Enid and uncle Charlie.

They were all recognisably human. For the moment.

No-one knew what strange atmospheric quirk had made the human genome so unstable. But instead of producing out-and-out mutants, the polluted world of 2100 had created a generation of humans who, when they made contact with a particular set of pollutants, reverted back to various incarnations of their ancestral forms. This was because, as one learned professor had explained, the genome contained bits of where we all came from right back to the origins of life.

The radio was on constantly even now on Christmas Day so that the regular warnings of chemical storms could be received and the whole lot of them could decamp into the cellar in a real emergency.

But Jonathan had an even better weapon than deep-earth shelter. He had bought and fitted new anti pollutant filters to all the ventilators in the building. These were supposed to filter everything but normal air in either direction and they seemed to be working for none of the family had reverted for quite a few days.

The whole family waited as Jonathon said grace. They started with worm soup, then he carved up the two four-legged turkeys so that they could get a leg each. This type of turkey had been bred some ten years before but had only come on the market this Christmas because the breeders had just figured out a way to catch them.

They had a GM brussels sprout the size of a basketball to share out, letter potatoes so that they each had their name on the plate, bouncing peas, and radioactive pudding to follow.

A howling storm arose outside. From experience the family agreed it was going at least 180 miles an hour. Jonathon wasn’t too worried about the house being damaged, buried as it was halfway inside a hill, (they were all made like that these days.)

The digital radio on the side cabinet came to life and the automated Wogan they used for such events said in a pleasing brogue:

“Sure, and the weather’s getting up a bit,” meaning that a severe storm was hitting Scotland. This also applied to chemical fallout. Jonathon prayed that the new filters would hold.

They didn’t.

As the family sat together there was a subtle change in the atmosphere of the room. Jonathan stood up ready to announce their removal to the sealed cellar supplied by pumped in oxygen. But the first change took place.

Grandfather turned into a bow-legged caveman while grandmother became a small lemurlike creature who searched his hairy hide for fleas. The twins, Castor and Pollux became small, chicken sizeed dinosaurs who ran around the room squawking excitedly. Lena reverted to a slothlike creature who promptly hooked on to the chandelier and hung there upside down dreamily scratching her backside.

Uncle turned into a lungfish on stilted legs who fell off his seat with a wet plop. Auntie became a small rodent with greenish fur who squeaked in fear as she ran around avoiding the dinosaurs who snapped at everything with their serrated teeth.

The walls seemed to rise around Jonathon and as his arms and legs receded into his body he realised he was turning back into the most primitive ancestor of all. As his hearing faded he heard the autoWogan say:

“And now me lads and lassies, a seasonal hymn, ‘Tis the season to be jolly”.

Jonathon corrected this wearily in his mind. To be jelly, he thought, not jolly. Jelly.

He squealched wearily under the table out of the way and prayed that the children did not revert back to human form first.

He didn’t want to be served up with the pudding.