NEVER ENOUGH

When I won the 118-million-euro rollover lottery, I raced to the market square at noon and stared at the sky—drinking in the looming indigo clouds promising a flurry of rain, and I felt like a Nietzschean Superman ready to create and destroy.

I moved out of my bedsit and bought a mansion in Mallorca. I imported a team of Zen Buddhist monks to cleanse the haunted west wing, where the spiders lived and a footballer’s wife had hung herself a generation ago.

I built an ivory throne and caged my murderous German shepherds by the glazed ceramic triple-tiered water fountain in the basement. When I felt destructive I let the dogs loose on the local grape farmers.

Because I could, I spiked a friend with a dangerously volatile fungus from the Venezuelan rainforest, smuggled in by a desperate pregnant tribal girl for over $30,000. Unfortunately, she fell and died beneath a tram just minutes before arriving at our meeting point in central London. But I managed to salvage the mushrooms, and my friend saw chainsaw wielding serpents wrapped in straitjackets, oozing pus. He sliced off his head with a bread knife in a blaze of manic psychosis.

But I wanted more.

I funded a small school in an even smaller Ghanaian village where the water was toxic and the politics foul. I donated pencils and everything. The kids sculpted busts of me and composed songs in my honour. Then I carpet-bombed the village with artillery bought from Lockheed Martin— which was surprisingly cheap.

I cleansed my sins, however, with a grand final gesture. I built a house for whores on a strange island where men—weak of mind—either homeless or broken by war, could have a massive sprawling orgy and climax like imploding stars.

And yet it wasn’t enough. I wanted to be a hurricane, or a force even greater than God, but I was stuck in the blazing sun, wearing euro trash rags beside an infinity pool, condemned forever to be a measly millionaire.

by Tim Frank

Tim Frank’s short stories have been published in Wrongdoing Magazine, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Maudlin House, Rejection Letters and elsewhere. He was runner-up in The Forge Literary Flash Fiction competition ‘22. He has been nominated for Best Small Fictions ’23.