Jon awoke with a start. His phone was ringing. He picked it up.
“Jon, is this your doing?!” Karyn asked.
“Is what my doing?” Jon asked back.
“Oh I don’t know, maybe this insane thing that’s going on across the world,” Karyn replied.
“I didn’t wish, for, anything weird, nothing that would cause worldwide chaos certainly. What’s going on?”
“You mean you don’t know? Turn on the news!”
Jon did as asked. “What… the hell, is this?”
It looked like CNN, but instead of a normal person, it was, someone in a weird and elaborate costume? Some sort of ugly monkey creature, but such a detailed and convincing costume. Was this a SNL sketch or something? No, it was actually CNN. He seemed to be playing it straight in this act too. Jon changed it to Fox news. And again, the anchor appeared to be wearing some sort of hideous monkey person costume. Those were costumes weren’t they? They weren’t actually hideous monkey creatures right?
“What’s going on Karyn? What are these creatures supposed to be?”
“It’s the whole world, outside of town. A friend of mine was in a zoom meeting when it happened. And the two who were outside of town just suddenly changed. And they thought nothing was the matter with them. Sounds suspiciously like a change that might have been caused by the stone don’t you think?”
“Sounds suspiciously like they turned on a filter as some sort of practical joke on your friend is what it sounds suspiciously like. But then is the whole world in on the joke? Are you saying that because of a wish, everyone outside of town got replaced by hideous alien pod people? Except at least in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the aliens looked like humans. These monkey things aren’t going to fool anyone. Except, they replaced everyone all at once? They wouldn’t need to fool anyone if they already took over the world.”
“Oh but that’s not the good part Jon, that’s not all. The two that changed, they thought my friend was the one who changed. They thought nothing at all was wrong with themselves, and that my friend had been a monkey creature like themselves, and then had changed into a cat person before their eyes.”
“Well that does sound like, everyone remembering things, as if it had always been that way, like the note said. So the stone changed their reality so that they thought humans were descended from monkeys or something?”
“Jon, don’t you get it? It said there was a range limit of a few miles. It means they didn’t change, we changed.”
“What? No! Are you saying those hideous monkey things are what humans looked like before? But all of human history. The ancient Greek pictures and statues, the paintings from hundreds of years ago, George Washington, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, all of culture, every movie ever made, are you saying that they were all originally monkey things and in town, and only in town, all of history, developed an entire backstory to make us think we evolved from cats, to support our memories making us think all of human history was that way?”
“It’s hard for me to believe too,” Karyn admitted.
“No wait, there’s just no way. And I’ll prove it. There’s no way monkeys could evolve to be something like us, they’re only found in parts of Africa and Asia, but cats are found naturally on every continent but Antarctica and Australia. Because cats are more adaptable and more intelligent and able to take on any challenges to adapt to different environments and take down prey larger than themselves with planning and tactics. Monkeys are vicious savage things that could never create a civilization even if they had the intelligence for it, and they’re very uniform in the niche they fill and environments they live in. By comparison just look at some of our relatives and how much they vary. They can live in the cold, in the heat, in arid deserts and moist swamplands, at the top of mountains or the bottom of trenches. Most are solitary but some are not, like lions. They form prides, groups, like we do, and exhibit teamwork. Monkeys can’t work together like that. It wouldn’t make any sense from an evolutionary viewpoint either, monkeys have no need for teamwork, they just sit around in trees all day in one biome eating leaves, bugs and grubs. They have no need or use for complex plans or adapting to other environments.”
“I don’t know, but I’m coming over there. We’ll fix this somehow. But don’t make any weird wishes before I get there!”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Jon said. “See you soon.”
Jon scratched at his scratching post, raking his claws in deep. It wasn’t perfect as a stress reliever but it was certainly welcome at times like this. There was just no way, right? Besides, he hadn’t even made any potentially world-changing wishes anyway, right?
“Meowwww?” Leopard Nimoy, his new kitten, said entering the room.
“Hi kitty,” Jon said, pawing at the little cat. A distant relative of his. Cats even made much better pets, they were better at everything. Monkeys, he had heard of them being kept as pets before, but that they couldn’t even be housetrained. A grotesque thought occurred to him. Was he also to believe that the gross monkey people keep little impish monkeys as pets instead of regular housecats?
He decided to wait for Karyn at the front door, so he slipped his hindpaws into his back sandals and his forepaws into his front sandals and trotted downstairs, his tail swishing angrily. He stood up on two legs and took off his right front sandal to open the front door and then slipped it back on and pulled the door closed behind him between both sandaled front paws.
“Monkey people,” Jon scoffed in disgust. “There’s just no way that’s how it’s supposed to be.” But if hypothetically it had been that way, how had it been changed? He certainly hadn’t wished for any big changes. Maybe not through his stone but something else? That would make a lot more sense, then the explanation wouldn't be that his town had been changed, but perhaps due to its proximity to the stone, maybe his town had been protected from the change. In any case one thing he knew for sure, he sure wasn’t going to be wishing himself or anyone he knew into being gross monkey things. It was the rest of the world that needed fixing, not his town.
