Fake Lottery Divorce

They told us that most couples who win the lottery wind up divorced, but we didn’t believe them. It seemed so farfetched. We love each other. It was only money, after all. Just because other couples didn’t know how to handle success didn’t mean we wouldn’t be able to. We’d handle that billion dollar Powerball jackpot with the grace and style we knew we’d be able to afford in the event that we ever won a billion dollar Powerball jackpot.

What a mistake. I didn’t realize how right they were, how wide a schism this would open in our relationship, what a catastrophe this would be for our marriage. If I had only known the damaging repercussions it would cause in our lives, I would never have accepted our fake lottery winnings.

“Fake lottery?” you ask. “Did you win the billion dollar Powerball jackpot or not?” You mean, the billion dollar pool of money out there for the taking? No, of course not. But that doesn’t matter. Counting our fake lottery winnings led to the same result. Thanks to that, I suspect we may be headed for a fake lottery divorce.

It all started when we began to discuss how we were going to divide our fake lottery winnings.

“I want to give a specific amount to each member of my immediate family, and double that to my mom,” I told her, dictating the terms of the money we were sure we were going to win. After all, the odds were only one in three hundred million.

“That’s the worst thing you can do,” she said. “What I want to do is offer to pay their bills discreetly for a specific period of time, say, a year. Otherwise, they keep coming back to you with their hands out.”

“Discreetly? What are you talking about?” I said. “You don’t want to tell anyone? I want the whole world to know.”

“No, because then you’ll have people knocking on your door night and day begging for money. Your phone will never stop ringing.”

I gritted my teeth. Already, the joy had disappeared from our fake lottery winnings. They had led to a fake lottery argument.

It’s all at our fingertips, isn’t it? The only thing you have to do is pick a bunch of silly numbers. There are only sixty numbers to pick from. No, wait, sixty-nine. And one ball with twenty-something. Twenty-six, maybe? Okay, so I’m not good with numbers.

We wound up not playing the Powerball after all, probably a good thing. We decided to stick to our fake lottery winnings. If our fake lottery argument had gone any further, it might have led to a fake lottery divorce, and that would have been a terrible thing. Who knows where the real thing may have led? Are there any other fake lottery winners out there wondering what to do with their fake lottery winnings?