The Town That Mimed

When the motor industry died, the factories subsisted on mime.

     

Imaginary wheels were mimed onto imaginary axels. Imaginary bodies were sprayed with imaginary paint. Imaginary cars were loaded on real lorries where they were sold in real showrooms for imaginary money. The workers would go home when the imaginary siren ran and then would mime eating sausages and chips from imaginary plates and pretend to watch imaginary game shows on non-existent televisions. 

After a while, nobody noticed that what they were living off wasn’t real. They were living as happily, or at least as uneventfully as they had before. Until they died from starvation.