Off went the respectable M&S blouse that chained her to her semi detached life, off went the smart but casual shoes that were suitable for all types of wear, She took a deep breath in and undid the top button of her man made fibre trousers (climate friendly, wash at less than 30) and breathed out a huge lungful of air. She paused as her flabby belly sagged with relief at being released from its eight hours of torturous captivity that a freedom fighter would have been proud to have been martyred for. Wriggling her legs, they stepped free of their dual dictators and continued on their mission.
“Mum! Please don't, Please! Just Stop!” a plaintive cry from behind her barely penetrated her conscious as she reached both arms up her back to undo the strap of her 42F Bra.
“Ohmygodshesgonnastriptotally!” did reach her, but she chose to ignore the rising hysteria in her teenage sons voice.
Footsteps on the sand behind her indicated that Clive had bothered to lift his head up from the Sunday Telegraph, noticing that his wife was naked down to her pants on the seafront and central to a slowly growing audience on the promenade. The only sounds of support were from two middle aged ladies, whooping and cheering, clapping Muriel on, as if she needed encouragement.
“Muriel? Dear..?” Clives whiny voice tailed off as Muriel cast off the final restraints of her pants shaped marriage, discarding her ambivalent husband and her spoilt children.
A few more steps and she was ankle deep in the sea. The cold numbed her feet immediately and she took a sharp intake of breath as the change in temperature shocked her system. Slowly her feet began to tingle and she waded deeper, the sea slowing her progress but not her intent.
When the water was coldly circling her what would have been her waist, but was more akin to a buoyancy aid, She plunged naked in the cool straits.
The appreciation of the audience was carried out across the water as she took her first unsteady strokes in 40 years. The waves lifted her 55 year old tired and overweight body and welcomed her home as though time had stood still and stopped on her fifteenth birthday.
Her heart soared with liberation and ecstasy, it joined the seagulls cawing and playing on the thermals, experimented on a particularly uplifting thermal and gained height before diving back down to scoop her up into the beak of freedom. Muriel dived into the salty water leaving her human skin floating like a deflated rubber dinghy surrounded by the fronds of her bladderwrack hair. Her new streamlined body curved through the silky currents hidden under the waves, and as the tide turned, she flicked her tail of freedom, no longer constrained by the net of social compliance.
