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Monday, February 19, 2018

Microstory 781: Sawbuck

Jane Brown hated her name. At least if she had been Jane Johnson, or Jane Jones, it would have been alliterative, but this was the most boring combination her parents could have come up with. She suffered through it her whole childhood, witlessly playing into her own insecurities on the matter, which only convinced those around her that she herself was boring. She ended up being admitted to a college on the other side of the country, though, and decided it was high time she reinvented herself. So, she took a gap year to earn a little extra cash, and start the relatively slow process of legally changing her name. She knew it would take a long time in her case since she would have to convince the court to allow such an unusual change. She had landed on the name Sawbuck, for no particular reason, except maybe she saw an advertisement for a sawhorse earlier that day. She would never know for sure, but it sounded perfect for her, because she wanted to become someone interesting; someone people talked about, and asked after. By the time her first semester started, she had completed all the paperwork, and was fully approved. She was now Sawbuck. Sawbuck Honeyglider. Her classmates and dorm neighbors would ask her about it, and she would never tell them that she made it up. She came up with a lie to explain where her family came from, and every time she told the story, shed add more and more flourishes. She never contradicted herself, though, so if her victims spoke to each other about it, they wouldn’t catch on to the fib. She got so good at it that she realized lying was her true passion. If she could weave this one incredibly intricate story about herself, maybe she could do it with some other story. So she sat down at her computer, and got to work. She came up with plausible falsehoods, but she didn’t incorporate them into a novel or short story. She didn’t write films or plays. She just wrote lies, and she found a way to spread them on the internet. Using what she had picked up on about law when she changed her name as a foundation, she taught herself how to set up false identities, and plant information in such a way that it looked like her characters had always existed, and that they had gone through all these harrowing or tragic experiences. She created an entire secret history of the world, all from her laptop, generating belief amongst even the most skeptical in the world in random, pointless, and sometimes innocuous things. Her reputation began to spread along with the lies themselves, and certain underground peoples began asking her for her help. This was how Sawbuck ‘Plain Jane’ Honeyglider turned herself into the infamous Fabricator.

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