Divorce: $189

It's a small yellow sign, thrust into the dirt of the median.  You drive across the train tracks right before you see it, rumble over the ties, under the highway feeder and past the police horses grazing in its shadow.  It's a nowhere stretch of road, limned by windowless buildings that warehouses or abbatoires or dance studios, and how would you know the difference?  In their company, the little yellow sign seems almost homey, a letter from a world in which humans, even if they fight, nevertheless breathe and drool and listen to their hearts.

People in this pass-through stretch of the world are snug in their cars or homeless.  Occasionally a policeman emerges from his vehicle to tend to the horses, bring them out from under the shadow of the overpass and parade them through the projects.  The littlest boys stop and stare; the older ones pretend not to notice.  Which is something: pretending not to see those hooves, those teeth.  

Divorce: so cheap!  Weddings are inching ever closer to $30,000, but divorce will set you back little more than a cable bill.   In terms of bang for your buck, it's tough to think of something else that will change your life so quickly, so effectively, at so little cost.  Your knots unknotted: your solitude secured; your children shuffled from hand to hand.


It's not an accident, this sign.  $189 and you're alone.  $0, and you're almost there.