Fat Lass Shrugged

This Friday Fictioneers submission is really a title in search of a story. Last week, I wrote about zombies moving to Switzerland to minimise their tax liabilities. I badly wanted to use this week’s title but zombies aren’t known for obesity or stoicism so I had to park it. Fortunately, Claire Fuller’swonderfully evocative photograph gave me another chance to use a relatively weak pun…(Apologies in advance if the use of the word/ ‘fat’ or ‘lass’ offend or if you find the attribution of political views reductive.

100 words exactly.

When Mary Celeste came back to her lingerie factory after lunch to find her entire workforce had vanished, she was nonplussed. Perhaps, she thought, they’d gone to work for Rowan Noake’s down the road.

It was a natural consequence of lax labour laws, said the conservatives. The socialists disagreed: after years of exploitation, the employees had revolted. Nonsense, said the feminists: they were standing up against the patriarchy. The animal libbers claimed the staff had developed a conscience over the mistreatment of silkworms.

Mary just sighed. It had probably been a bad idea to relocate operations to the Bermuda Triangle.