Gerald and the Tyranny of Thread

Gerald harbored an irrational, visceral hatred for socks. Not just wearing them – the very *concept* of them. He'd deliver impassioned, unsolicited lectures about their oppressive cotton, their insidious elastic, their notorious tendency to vanish into the dimensional void of the laundry machine. He’d cross busy streets to avoid department store sock displays, boycott any establishment that dared peddle the foot-coffins, and once famously disrupted a knitting circle with a blistering manifesto on "Foot Liberation."

His life was a perpetual, exhausting war against the textile menace. He only wore sandals, even during blizzards that turned his toes a delightful shade of cerulean. His greatest fear was accidentally being handed a pair. Friends worried; his family staged a futile intervention. "Gerald," they’d plead, "it's just fabric!" But Gerald knew better. They were a conspiracy. A soft, suffocating conspiracy designed to entrap the unsuspecting human foot.

One evening, after a particularly harrowing skirmish involving a rogue sock that had escaped a neighbour’s laundry basket and pursued him for three blocks, Gerald collapsed onto his armchair. He sighed, ran a hand over his furrowed brow, and then, with a profound sense of self-loathing, looked down at his bare foot. Slowly, meticulously, he began to unravel his big toe, which seemed to be made of rather sturdy, heather-grey yarn.

"Oh, for the love of all that's holy and cotton-blend," he muttered, watching the thread spool onto the floor. "I'm a sock, aren't I? A very, very large, self-aware sock with a deep-seated identity crisis and an inexplicable loathing for my own kind."