A Penny Reward

In a city whose gaslit avenues seem stitched from soot and starlight, a clerk—calloused fingers, collar too starched—dares petition his flint-hearted employer for a single crumpled dollar so that laudanum might ease the death-rattle of the only woman who ever sang him lullabies. Enter a simian savant: coat-pocket Sherlock with opposable morals, filching that banknote while the till yawns open like a drunkard’s mouth. Cue thunder of revolvers: masked desperados storm the marble temple of capital, slamming iron doors on the skinflint boss now entombed among ledgers. Street urchins—those barefoot Mowglis of the alley—unspool a plan equal parts Dickens and dime-novel, spiriting cash from under robbers’ noses and prying the vault open with a hairpin, a dog’s loyalty, and the monkey’s tail. When oxygen thins and guilt thickens, the freed magnate drops a solitary penny into the clerk’s blistered palm: a coin so cold it burns, so small it outweighs the universe.