Zior was not your average man. He wore socks with sandals, drank pickle juice from a wine glass, and insisted that pigeons were just government-issued sky rats. But his greatest quirk, the one that earned him local fame (and several restraining orders), was his lifelong quest to find fifteen cents.
Not a dollar. Not a gold nugget. Fifteen measly cents.
Zior lived in his mum’s basement, which doubled as a conspiracy command centre, complete with old pizza boxes labelled "evidence" and a wall covered in string connecting photos of coin-operated laundromats. He claimed he once sensed the fifteen cents near a vending machine in 1997, and he had never recovered.
He journeyed far and wide — from the couch cushions of a Finnish hostel to the storm drains of suburban Perth. “It’s out there,” he’d mutter to confused passersby while waving around a bent metal detector and sniffing the air like a bloodhound with allergies.
Everyone believed him. Not because it made sense, but because Zior was incredibly persuasive in the way only truly weird people can be. He once convinced a TEDx audience that the government had hidden 15-cent coins in Area 52, “the *real* secret base.” The applause was only interrupted when he tried to demonstrate coin levitation using baked beans and a magnet.
But here’s the kicker: fifteen cents doesn’t exist. Not as a single coin. Not as a currency anomaly. It was all in Zior’s head — a fever dream sparked by dropping a ten cent and a five cent piece behind the couch in 1989 and never recovering.
Still, he searched. He searched in fountains. In glove compartments. He once tried to bribe a toll booth operator with interpretive dance in exchange for information about “the quarter that’s not quite.”
Zior is still out there. Living in his mum’s basement, posting cryptic TikToks with captions like “I saw it blink. The 15¢ is ALIVE.” No one has the heart to tell him the truth. Or maybe they do… but they're worried what will happen if he stops looking.
Because sometimes, the world needs a weird guy in socks and sandals, chasing an imaginary coin.
And sometimes, just sometimes, you gotta believe in something… even if it’s fifteen cents short of a dollar.
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