The March of Progress

The boy prince straightens his back and his face as camera flashes illuminate the funeral procession. In due course, a tv reporter narrates gleefully, the boy will inherit the crown from his father and grandfather. In due course – sixty or eighty years from now, if the boy is lucky – he will have a state funeral of his own.

The next day, he visits his favourite polo pony at her stable. The boy was bred to rule, but the horse did him one better – she’s a clone, forged at great expense from the genes of the champion mare Francisca Sofia III. Around the world, an exclusive club of ambitious sportsmen and overindulged children are raising eleven other identical fillies. In the well-kept fields of the royal estate, Little Frannie and her prince run, run, run until no person or camera can capture them.

Hair

Things got weird when the trees started growing hair. It was spring in the northern hemisphere, and instead of buds and leaves, the bare trees sprouted masses of human hair, in every shade and texture of black, brown, and blond.

Patterns emerged soon enough. Japanese maples, which the planners of my small Ontario town apparently favoured, invariably grew long auburn ringlets, spilling over the branches and spiraling ceaselessly in the wind. The one in my father’s front yard tangled into the wild afro of the ancient oak next door, so that to get to his porch you had to duck under what looked like the desiccated pelts of several tigers.

Through the summer, the hair bleached white in the sun. My father tripped over the still-accumulating masses and broke his hip.

In the fall, the hair shed in great clumps and we twirled our rakes like forks in spaghetti to pile it onto the curbs.

At least Christmas was almost normal – evergreens seemed to be totally unaffected. We didn’t usually bother with a real tree, but the prospect of ordinary, definitely-not-human-hair pine needles was too much to resist.

I don’t mean to say that we weren’t weirded out. The biologists still had no explanation and the ecologists warned of devastating impacts to ecosystems worldwide. My father, who had moved in with us after his accident, spent the winter watching too much TV and arguing with my partner over whether it was the End of Days or just chemtrails. Still, life moved on. When the largest orchard owner in Ontario and Vermont went bankrupt, a wigmaker bought them out.

In the spring, we thought we were ready for the cycle to begin again. But we soon realized that the trees chose other body parts to grow this year.