Der kleine Muck

A scrawny outcast, derided as ‘Little Muck,’ is ejected from his native alleyways after his father’s death; clutching nothing but a pair of cracked slippers and a tattered kaftan, he stumbles into a sun-bleached desert where mirages whisper secrets of a buried sultanate. There he unearths a clandestine shopkeeper—part necromancer, part pawnbroker—who barters enchanted artifacts for scraps of human memory. Muck trades his last tear for a cane that gallops faster than guilt, a scarf that renders its wearer transparent as gossip, and a box of apricot pits that sprout palaces overnight. Gifted with velocity, invisibility, and baroque excess, he rockets back to the perfumed metropolis of his tormentors, ricocheting through marble arcades and moonlit rooftops, pilfering not gold but the very moment when bullies blink. Yet each miracle demands its pound of flesh: the cane shortens his stride, the scarf erases his reflection, the pits devour the sound of his name. By the time Muck realizes that magic is merely debt wearing a turban, the city has crowned him tyrant, the girl who once offered bread now spits at his shadow, and the dunes have crept to the city gates like a slow verdict. In a final act of self-excoriation he shatters the cane, burns the scarf, scatters the pits into the sea, and walks—barefoot, nameless, but finally audible—into a horizon that swallows legends the way time swallows fingerprints.