Saturday Afternoon

They woke up expecting alarms, bills, and the quiet dread of checking balances.
Instead, the screens were blank.
Prices were gone not crossed out, not marked $0.00, just… absent. Grocery apps showed pictures of food with no numbers beneath them. Gas station signs flickered, then settled into nothing but brand logos. Rent portals refreshed endlessly, as if embarrassed to ask for money that no longer mattered.
At first, people assumed it was a glitch. By midmorning, denial became curiosity.
A woman at a corner café ordered a coffee and reached for her wallet out of habit. The barista smiled not relieved, not smug, just calm and slid the cup across the counter.
“It’s free,” he said, like he was stating the weather. “But—” she started.
“So is the next one,” he added. Word traveled faster than panic ever had.
People tested it carefully, the way you step onto ice that looks too thin. A man filled his tank and waited for someone to shout. No one did. Parents walked out of grocery stores pushing full carts, half-expecting alarms to scream. They didn’t. Hospitals stopped asking for insurance. Pharmacies handed over medications with instructions, not invoices.
By noon, the world was loud not with sirens, but with laughter, crying, and the strange sound of relief breaking through disbelief. Then came the harder questions.
If everything was free… who would work?
At first, many didn’t. Offices emptied. Factories paused. People slept, really slept, for the first time in years. They sat on floors with their children. They called their parents. They stood in silence, stunned by how much of their lives had been spent earning permission to exist.
But by the second day, something unexpected happened. People showed up anyway. Not everyone.
Not everywhere. But enough.
Doctors came back not for bonuses, but because bodies still broke. Farmers tended fields because food still had to grow. Electricians fixed lines because darkness helps no one. Teachers gathered children under trees and in libraries because learning didn’t stop being important just because it stopped being profitable. Work changed. People stopped asking, “How much does this pay?” and started asking, “Does this matter?”
Some things vanished. Useless products. Predatory jobs. Entire industries built on scarcity collapsed quietly, like sandcastles meeting the tide. A few people tried to hoard, but hoarding lost its power when abundance couldn’t be owned.
Conflict didn’t disappear but it softened. When survival was no longer a weapon, arguments had to find new reasons to exist. Weeks later, a reporter asked an old woman what she thought caused it.
She shrugged. “Maybe nothing changed,” she said. “Maybe we just remembered something we agreed to forget.”
“What’s that?” the reporter asked. “That the world was never owned,” she said.
“We just charged each other rent for being alive.”
That night, cities glowed a little differently. Not brighter just steadier. Fewer lights left on out of fear. More windows open. More music drifting into the streets.
Everything was free. And for the first time, people had to decide without money as an excuse
what they would give back.