Where have all the odd ones gone?

This piece was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘reserve’.

When Alfie Centauri announced that he’d discovered where in the universe all the odd socks that disappeared in the weekly wash ended up, the responses from the public were culturally diverse (which of course was much to the satisfaction of ‘woke’ people) and tinged with a sense of reserve.

Hipsters said they never had that problem because they’d given up wearing them years ago to concentrate on growing beards and opening barista bars, where they could converse at length with customers about the quality of the crema and the impeccable FairTrade credentials of their beans.

App developers in Silicon Valley didn’t stop working on ways to embed cheap computer chips in socks so that they could always be tracked down, just like FindMyPhone, using a new technology called FoxMySox.

Obsessive-compulsive people smiled smugly, having…