A Short Short Story – The Clothes

…There came the day when our clothes started to walk around without us, running our errands, going to our office jobs, conducting our meaningless love affairs. We had always distrusted inanimate objects in general: the broken staircase; the kitchen table that had it in for you, always banging your elbow; the bicycle rack that let your bicycle clatter to the ground — but we had trusted our clothes, for they had always seemed a part of us, in a sense; garments that bore the very contours and indentations of our bodies.

But now, they were walking around without us like mannequins, strolling the boulevards like automatons. They abandoned us, our clothes did, became sentient, started lives of their own. Pompous and proud, they strolled the avenues, needing no human bodies to support them.

…And so without our clothes, we were left to confront the very nature of our bodies, so pale and lumpy and misshapen, we had almost forgotten, they had been hidden for so long — and even the best-looking of us did not look so very good in the middle of the day, in the direct glaring sunlight. …And so without our clothes, we began to hide. Without our clothes, we were left to our own devices; shy and trembling; tunneling through a naked world — wishing that we could hug one another for comfort but entirely too uncomfortable to do so.