It didn’t used to be like this. He was pretty sure. Almost
sure. Like, 99% sure.
It must have been incremental. He knows he started measuring
2 years ago. So it had been happening before that.
The problem was that the measurements changed as the chins
changed. He took out the ruler: 29.8 cm. He looked in his A4 notebook - neatly
written on the faded blue lines were a list of dates and measurements. Each one
said 29.8 cm and there was a little comment along the lines of– “previously
said 29.8cm!” or “now the ‘previously’ has changed!” or “why would I write a
comment if they were just the same?”. He took out his pen and wrote in today’s
assessment.
23/11/16
29.8cm previously 29.6cm (I
think)
He was well aware that when he shut the book it would
change, just like all the other days.
Of course, at first, It was all quite innocuous. He merely
noticed that people who had been unremarkable before were suddenly quite
jawsome. He commented to his friend that a colleague was looking rather
“lantern faced” – his friend’s response was “yeah I guess but doesn’t
everyone”… and it was kind of true.
He thought about it. When was the last time anyone had been
called a chinless wonder?
It was glacial. It was a boiling frog that never gets out of
the pan because the temperature never rises sharply enough. It was the drip,
drip, drip of stalactites forming or maybe Chinese water torture.
A while later, he
doesn’t know when, he looked in the mirror and noticed that his own head was
now rather square, previously having been triangular at the bottom.
He asked his friend if his appearance had changed at all?
His friend laughed and told him he was the same ugly git as always. He laughed
and coyly asked about his chin, you know, his jaw? It was just the same as
before he was assured but he noticed that his friend’s face was distinctly
bulging at the sides…. Just like everyone else’s.
A few days later he told his friend his theory. People’s
jaws had started to grow. It was so obvious. His friend laughed at him. He
suggested they look up old photos to compare. They did, of themselves, of
celebrities, of old timey people from the Victorian era. All of them. All of
them, large jawed, granite chiselled chins, a powerful base to the face.
“The chin’s what makes us human, you nutter,” his friend
laughed.
He was no longer his friend.
That’s when he started his diary. That’s when he started his
research.
For example, he was pretty sure there used to be a whole
load of face types you could have, people being described as moon faced or…
well, whatever other terms they used. Now everyone was described as being a
block or a pointer. You know, ‘cos their head tapered at the top?
The diary, every day, of course, as you know, showed
everything the same, even though he knew it changed.
As time went on things began to grow more ridiculous. He
noticed people at his work had jaw rests for when they were using their computers.
He asked and they’d always had them, of course. His colleague told him she’d
had her’s since she was 16. It certainly looked old.
There were other little things, like, shaving had crept in
as something people talked about like the weather. “Ugggh, getting up half an
hour before sunrises to shave, I hate winter!” That kind of thing.
He became fascinated by famous works of art. He would search
one a day to see if it matched the picture in his head. The Mona Lisa: Bulbous
jaw. The Scream: rectangular. Vitruvian Man: chin heavy.
Unfortunately, the picture in his head changed too. He could
only ever picture swollen jawed Lisa, or The Laughing Cavalier’s tiny pointed
beard in the middle of his gargantuan face end.
And even in his book – his journal of “madness” - he could never
exactly remember the original dimensions he had written in; just that they had
been .. smaller?
As time went on things became less trivial. He was sure
there used to be 7 billion people in the world, not 3, right? That previously the “Miracle of the
C-Section” was not a common phrase. That the third world wasn’t so
underpopulated because everyone died in childbirth from these massive jawed
freaks?
It annoyed him more than anything else. Why was he the only
one who saw it?
He posted on conspiracy boards and was generally ignored.
Too outré even for the crazies he supposed. Until one day he had a response
that interested him.
“Have you ever considered,” it began, “that it’s not the
chins that have widened but that your previous memories are false? That they’ve
all been implanted? Occam’s Razor, my friend, Occam’s Razor.”
He leant back and rested his jaw on either side of his
shoulders and nodded.
Of course, of course.