THE INVENTION by Lynn Collins Jerabek

I feel it is my bounden duty, given the severity of the attack upon honest and true science and those who perpetrate it, to bring to your contest my invention. I understand that you are limiting your contest to items dealing with truth, or at least the attempt to render truth identifiable. Admittedly, you do not know of my credentials nor even my very self, but I assure you, my entry is well qualified to identify those times and those persons in which or in whom truth is misty at best.

My invention consists of twenty three parts. They have similarities in that they fit together like an almost perfectly cut puzzle, but what makes it work so well is that their differences are, by the nature of their composition, still compatible. Occasionally one part is missing for a moment or two. In such a case, those remaining close ranks and fill in the emptiness. It works like water filling in the shaped indents left by my feet in the sand closest to the edge of the tide. The tide rushes to the footprints in varying fulnesses: sometimes very full, flooding the shore, sometimes almost not even quite enough to approach my path.

So. My invention. I must admit it does not work well upon its own initiative. I must give constant attention to each of the twenty three parts. They get as cranky as an old machine that needs a tune up, but when properly fueled and given enough time between bursts of required activity, my beautiful 23 parts work as one. One Day at a Time.

For at the end of each day, all twenty three parts have a way of separating and going to their own place of repose where attendants refuel them and restore any worn edges. I do not concern myself with this; the attendants are fully qualified. In the morning I will stand at the door looking out to the rising sun and welcome back the twenty three children in my beautiful kindergarten class. And if you think they cannot sniff out a liar….