This is Drabbletober, the podcast of tiny fiction.

Hello, and welcome to Drabbletober. This is episode 10, season 2, for Friday the tenth of October 2025. I'm Elizabeth Guilt.

Your one-hundred word story for the day is:

I'm Bigger Than You

by Elizabeth Guilt

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As a kid, it was always her brother. The threat was explicit - and followed up with physical demonstrations.

The same threat hid, discreetly, behind her teachers' words. Later, it threaded through drunken conversations in bars, in unwanted offers of help or a lift home.

She sits in the boardroom, and feels it oozing - again, still - from the investors, from the chairman, even from the junior insurance guy. She clinches the deal anyway. She wins. It doesn't help. She is so tired.

She books the appointments: bone expansion, femur and spine extensions, muscle bulking. Under "goals", she writes impossibly high numbers.

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In my day job, I work in a very male-dominated environment. I'm also very lucky: I have smart colleagues to whom gender is not an issue. But despite - in this country - decades of legislation, equality is not a done deal. My hot take is that size and physical strength is a big part of this.

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Take care, everyone, and I'll see you tomorrow for episode 11.

https://www.elizabethguilt.com/drabbletober/s2episode10