You sit down for dinner. Your leftmost fork is not only smaller than its dinner fork cousin to its right, it also has one tine that is shorter than the rest. You are not alarmed by this. You know that this is a tomato fork. That one shortened tine is to assist you in the stabbing of cherry tomatoes in your salad. No one knows why this helps, but it does. It’s some kind of ancient magic, the kind that they don’t teach you at Hogwarts because it would be too vulgar for children, but it works. It’s a tomato fork. You know this.
Years pass. People invent social media because why not. And then one day you’re on Forkbook and someone brings up how difficult it can be to stab cherry tomatoes with a fork and you are confidently about to tell this cretin that this is why God created the tomato fork but when you go to Google it first so as to bolster your argument you discover that there is no such thing.
What? How! You think back. When did you first learn what you think you know about the tomato fork? You were 15 and you woke in a cold sweat from a dream in which Martha Stewart was flogging you with a cat o’ nine tails, but it’s different than usual. This time she made you identify the small fork with the one short tine as a tomato fork. Say it! And you said it. And now thanks to some dummy on social media and a Google search you realize that your whole life is a lie.
The tomato fork.