When the air quality got progressively worse, the first change we noticed was in the children.
They all had gravely, husky voices. The young boys sounded like Harvey Fierstein and the girls like Kathleen Turner. They started drinking their milk and various juices exclusively from martini glasses and wore kimonos at all hours. But this was the height of their sophistication, for they all became wise-asses too, like they were Don Rickles coming up for a segment on one of those Dean Martin roasts. ‘I kid, I kid,’ was a phrase used often to placate and perhaps identify.
To make their voices higher and their cutting observational humour recede, the children were given large doses of helium.
When the children started exploding, we cloned them, spending many years perfecting this process, so that when the children were cloned with their memories in tact (it took hours to find the DNA strand containing up-to-date genetic memory, years to extract and harness it, and many more years to excise the strand that contained satirical absurdism) and these clones were taken in by non-plussed great grand-nephews and -nieces. The clones had a difficult time adjusting to being out of time and touch with the children their age, who no longer used their vocal-cords, communicating with a series of hand gestures and eye brow cues through their air-purifying masks.
But everything worked out for them in the end. You’ll just have to take my word for it.
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