Resolution

Two weeks since I started this challenge.

L.C. Schäfer proposed to spend 2024 choosing to write a microfiction story every day, making 366 stories for every day of this lovely leap year and here we are at 14! That deserves a toast!. You can check her original story out here:

Prompt number fourteen:

In light of the New Year, write a story called "Resolution".

***

"You have to show resolve in order to reach resolution," Adipose Mater advised the class. "It doesn't happen without some application, you know."

Adipose Mater looked at her charges this year. All of them lazy and all of them overweight. She didn't hold out much hope of making them anything other than the fat malodorous lumps they were currently.

"Right! Everyone get up!" She barked and watched with disdain as they moved, like sluggish hippos, scraping their chairs over the floors and standing, dowdy, docile and dumb like a herd of hairless cows.

***

It was clear that Adipose Mater was going to have to try a different tactic this year as her normal intimidation starvation routine was ironically (and metaphorically) losing weight rather than gaining it, unlike her charges, who, it seemed, were very much becoming bigger. The collective scale read seven pounds heavier. Was it all of them? Was it one of them? She would have to divide them up and by doing so, conquer, like all good dictators and empires through history. Maybe she would then be in line for The Academy's coveted Reduction Motivator of the Year Award. God knows, she deserved it for having to work year on year with the detritus of society.

"You! Lump!" She pointed out a spotty, greasy specimen, clad in stretchy elasticated wear in a khaki green. Hideous. "What's your number?'

"212," the specimen replied.

"You will be weighed this week on your own. If you are not lighter, the group's food will be forfeit for a week following."

Gasps. Adipose Mater smirked. That would show them. They'd be motivated now.

***

There was no weight loss. Food was forfeit.

But the group's response was unexpected even in the context of all of Adipose Mater's years of rigorous and unrelenting inhumane behaviour.

As next week, there was no person to weigh and the collective group was, in fact, almost the same weight, despite there being one person missing. The difference in weight would have equalled, say, the weight of stretchy elasticated wear in, say, a khaki green.

Adipose Mater gulped. Losing weight was the goal, but losing specimens? Unacceptable. Adipose Mater's days, like the specimens themselves, were numbered.

***

.366 words

Bit of a dark one, this and I'm not sure from what shady corner of my mind this emerged but think it may have something to do with tight trousers, Christmas gluttony and self-disgust, coming out in fiction form.

I try but there's still Christmas cake, you know? Don't be too hard on me, Adipose Mater and don't disrespect the elasticated trousers. This being was built for comfort.

Thanks for stopping by! If you do read it, please do drop a comment as I love it when people drop by and it's always god to interact.

If you would like to read the first week of my stories, check out the list here:

It was Rubber Duckie Day yesterday which I am so glad is a thing and you can check that out here:

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