c l o n e s
"―—and I have a few things I need to get clear," my son's statement caught up with me. I waved a finger at him, "Be silent!"
I hitched up my belt and took a deep breath, "Now then."
"You're not some sort of demonic hellspawn," I assured them, focusing my attention on Emo first. "You're just a genetic copy of me. I'm not demonic hellspawn, am I? No. I'm just a regular guy, and when you grow up, you'll get to be a regular person too. Just like me. Isn't that comforting?"
Emo turned halfway away from me in his chair, shaking his head. His shoulders slumped and his head dropped in shame.
"Lots of people have daughters," I stated, turning to Alex, "and being the spawn of my loins probably triggers some fatherly genetically-coded repulsion for you.
Just because you're a younger, nubile version of my wife, does not mean I have any sort of a sexual attraction to you Alex," I said. You are my daughter, and that is all you are. Nothing more, nothing less."
Alex‘s eyes were like saucers as her face flushed bright red and she put her hands over her face.
"Who cares what they say? Let them think we're a family of perverts!" I exclaimed, shaking my fists at the ceiling. "That doesn't incriminate us! That incriminates them! It's their imaginations coming up with that stuff! They‘re the perverts!"
With a wail Joan burst into tears, folding her arms over her head on the table in a heap of hopeless sobbing.
I frowned at each one of my family in turn, not that they noticed. Each one was lost in their own world. How did I end up with this gaggle of neurotic losers?
"Look," I said, my energy expended, and the weariness creeping in, "the point is that it doesn't matter what people think. They can only persecute you if you let them. If they have a problem with cloned children, then that's their problem, not yours. Lots of people have problems with other people. It gives them something to distract them from focusing on what pathetic losers they are themselves and working to better themselves.
"Every time one of the kids at school taunts you about being clones of your parents—your highly successful parents, who are pinnacles of the community, you're going to feel hurt and nothing‘s going to prevent that.
-12-
