So, Kit Power's latest book is an odd one, even for him. You'll have seen the title of this post - "Millionaires Day" - and already had a reaction I'm sure. Either you remember that day vividly (despite the fact that, post-Covid, no one ever seems to talk about it) or you'll be denying it ever happened, that it was all just internet bollocks. Two tribes.
I was reluctant to even post this piece, to be honest. I'll probably not check my DMs for awhile after it goes live.
But Kit's wrote a whole book about it, so god knows what his messages are going to be like.
The book's being marketed as 'fiction' for reasons obvious to anyone who's spent any time on the internet (especially that message-board...) so, yeah - fiction. Sure. So as part of Kit's research for his FICTIONAL book he asked some fellow writers to send him their FICTIONAL recollections of that time. I don't know in what mischievous and ingenious ways Kit will have used what I sent him, but I thought I'd post the original piece on here to help promote Millionaires Day (which is being formally launched at FantasyCon in Chester in a few weeks).
So: this is just a piece of make believe, if that's what you want to think. Just a story. Don't @ me.
#millionairesday
Did it happen? I remember it happening, but when I look online, at what other people apparently think they remember, I’m not sure how much proof that is.
When I go outside to my—well, it’s not a garden, but the few metres of dead grass I call a garden—when I go outside to the garden, I still expect to see the black scorch marks. Look up and I still expect to see smoke, and that the sky might snow this winter. But there are no scorch marks, and we’ve fucked the weather too much for snow.
But what I do remember is this: how surreal it seemed, after having made a cuppa from yesterday's reused tea-bag, after having checked the expiration date on the dried noodles I’d got from the food-bank despite the fact that I'd nothing else and would have to eat them regardless… - I remember how surreal it felt to find all that money under my sagging bed. Finding a tenner would have been cause for celebration; finding all that—I felt elated, but scared too, almost. Like something had gone wrong and I’d be held accountable.
I unlocked my phone, to open social media—because that’s what you do, isn’t it, when something special or untoward happens? You check social media. But it was down, all of it. Every site. I reasoned I’d just not paid some bill or other. I looked again at the case of money under my bed; I could pay those bills and debts now. More importantly, I could eat.
But I still felt uneasy. Like when someone gives you something and you’ve not got a gift to give them back. Or like when you have to go to a food bank.
I took some of the money, planning to buy a load of booze—and I mean a load—and food. It was only when I left the house I realised that what had happened to me hadn’t only happened to me. Already half he shops were shut as the owners partied, and in those that remained open the prices—felt-tipped over the original, printed ones— looked as surreal as the cash under my bed had done. I bought the booze but not the food; back home I had vintage Champagne and Hakushu whisky and dried, out-of-date noodles… and I felt a bitterness as I heard the cheers and whoops from outside. Everyone else was doing the same as me, minus the noodles. I’d felt special for a moment, different, but barely hours later I was back to being the same as everyone else, but shitter.
I remember, I’m sure I do, that I took the case of money outside to the ‘garden’, poured BBQ fluid over it, and set it alight. As the black smoke rose into the sky I looked up and saw that it had started to snow—in my drunken vision it looked like a blizzard and it was like I’d caused it, like because of me we’d have a white Christmas. Because of me.
And then I saw the swirls and eddies of black smoke rising up all over the estate, and I shouted swear words at all the other fuckers, all the other trapped fuckers like me running down the same rat-runs, and then I must have blacked out or passed out—stupid, I don’t even like Champagne—and when I woke up my tiny garden was blackened and sooty, but the sky, the sky was still snowing and we did have a white Christmas, all of us, despite what the weather records say that year.
That’s what I remember.