If you’re like me, you’re floored by the number of times that people get taken in by fake memoirs, autobiographies and other grocery lists of the soul. How many more times do we need to be told, “Don’t believe everything that you read”? And what does the veracity of a memoir, a “this-really-happened” feeling, add to our reading experience anyway?  Can’t we just leave things at amusing, memorable or thought-provoking?  For the past four months I’ve been writing everyday under completely different names; a series of traps towards credulity. 

   Here’s my story for today.

 

The Marriage Contraption

 

“What a thing to behold,” the husband kept telling his wife, morning, noon and night. One morning she asked him to get up from the couch and leave. “Would you kindly leave,” she implored. He gestured towards the marriage contraption which he’d built to woo her senseless. “I’ve come to my senses,” she flat out stated, “You’re nothing but smoke and mirrors and you don’t lift a finger around here. You don’t even have a job.” He claimed that he needed to maintain the marriage contraption. She opened the door and pointed something at him. Three months later, she passed him on the street where he sat on the sidewalk with his hand pillowing his face. He had an upturned hat in front of the marriage contraption. She threw several quarters into the hat where they clinked into other change. He looked up and smiled, an act that lifted all the features of his face, a ploy that won her heart once upon a time. His fingertips reached out for the marriage contraption. She reached into her purse and pulled out the divorce device and continued walking.