Felix Lends a Hand

A soot-smudged silhouette trudges across a sepulchral snowscape, whiskers rimed with frost; the town’s only warmth emanates from a gaudy billboard that blazes like a fever-dream of ochre dunes and cobalt skies. Felix—tail twitching like a metronome of discontent—offers up four of his nine souls for a single sun-bleached breath of Egypt. The cosmos answers with a sob: inside Abdul’s rug-draped bazaar, tears bead on cedar counters as the carpet-seller confesses that his beloved has been spirited away by a lascivious sheik whose silken turban hides a heart of basalt. Without hesitation, Felix commandeers a threadbare flying carpet—its warp and weft humming with djinn-breath—utters the forbidden syllable that tastes of saffron and static, and catapults into a sky bruised violet by twilight. What follows is not a rescue but a metamorphosis: pyramids tilt like drunken teeth, sand coils into serpentine glyphs, and the cat becomes both pilgrim and plague, unraveling the sheik’s opulent mirage thread by luminous thread until the kidnapped woman steps forth no longer victim but sovereign, her laughter scattering the desert like gold dust in a sirocco.