Grandma's Face

As she picked open the wrapping Grandma's face changed channels on the TV. She was following Helena Chroy’s ‘Exercise Your Face to Astounding Loveliness’ regime, as set out in ‘Beauty Secrets the Ancients Don’t Want You to Know’. By March or April she planned to be launching ships with her face but for the moment she was practising on household chores.

Cooking the Christmas dinner had been an effort. She had chewed the wrapping from the pre-packed turkey, nudged open the oven door with her nose, fastened her teeth on a turkey leg and swung the turkey backwards and forwards until she judged it to have the right speed and angle to land squarely in the roasting dish. She had missed a few times, but what was a dirty turkey in comparison to the secrets of the ancients? She was sure her family would understand.

Her family did understand. Mark, her oldest son, had spent the last few months digging the foundations for a full-sized pyramid in his paddock. He was planning to finance his construction by razor-blade sharpening services and offering to baffle scientists over how he had built it. Nobody had yet brought any blades for sharpening, and those who wanted to baffle scientists seemed unwilling to pay for the service, but he had high hopes. He had built a scientist enclosure where they could come to be baffled and a warehouse for the razor blades that would most surely be on their way soon.

During Christmas dinner a boulder had smashed through the dining room window and landed in the Christmas pudding. A flaming piece of pudding had adhered to Grandma’s forehead. At first she had tried to put it out by directed spitting, but when her hair began to scorch she decided that even the secrets of the ancients couldn’t combat burns and baldness and had poured a glass of water over her head. Somebody a few streets away had built a trebuchet and was testing it on the local housing stock before going in search of a fort. Grandma called the police, but they only attended modern crimes. Grandma suggested the trebuchet might not have a tax disk and they perked up at once and promised to send somebody round to investigate.

Meanwhile, Grandma was becoming ever more anciently beautiful. Her teeth had rotted and fallen out in a manner utterly bewildering to dentists and she had assumed a rat-fur wig to replace her scorched hair. Her face was painted with all manner of startlingly bright but highly toxic chemicals from entirely natural toxic sources. As she gummed open her presents, her face sloughed right off, landing on the remote control and changing channels on the TV, just in time to hear the weather man announce a total eclipse of the sun. That, as everyone knew, meant the end of the world, and so at two-thirty on Christmas day it ended. Scientists were baffled.