The Merchant by Roman Hubin

In a village perched at the edge of a salt-white desert,

there lived a girl named Mira whose shadow was longer than anyone else's, stretching at dusk all the way to the well at the centre of the square, as if it were thirsty.

One evening, a merchant arrived driving a wagon loaded with glinting curiosities: clocks that ticked backwards, mirrors that showed Tuesday instead of today, and jars of bottled laughter. He had the eyes of a man who had seen everything in his life, but wanted more. «I'll trade you,» the merchant said, studying Mira's extraordinary shadow, «anything you desire - for that.» Mira thought about her ill mother, whose medicine cost more than their harvest. Without hesitation, she agreed. The merchant laid a cloth over her shadow and wrapped it with a quick move. He folded it into a square of darkness no bigger than a handkerchief. In its place, he dropped a pouch that clinked with enough coins to fill a physician's jar thrice over. Mira ran home, bought the medicine, and her mother inhaled her new life.

But a life without a shadow, she learned, was strange in ways she hadn't imagined. Dogs would not approach her. Children pointed. The old women of the village whispered that shadowless people had given something essential away - a piece of their substance, the part of you that proves you occupy space in the world and not merely dream it. In bright sun, she looked like a ghost of herself. At night, she felt oddly light, as though her body had forgotten how heavy it was supposed to be, but when it’s morning, she feels like all the light goes through her, as if the world itself is not aware of her presence. She followed the merchant's wagon wheel-ruts into the desert. She walked for three days. The white sand through the heat at her, followed by the direct sun rays falling upon her forehead. She grew so thirsty that she began to see water in every shimmer. And on the third afternoon, she found it - a still black lake in the middle of nothing at all, and at its shore, the merchant's wagon, wheel-deep in the sand, with every clock ticking backward, unwinding time.

The merchant sat beside the lake, surrounded by dozens of folded shadows - some short, some long, some luminous grey. He had been collecting them for years. He thought, somehow, that if he gathered enough of them, he might get his own back. Because the merchant, Mira saw at last, had no shadow either. She felt no triumph in it. Only pity, clean and cool as water. «You traded yours too,» she said. «Long ago.»

The old man said nothing, but his hands shook. Mira swiftly opened the lid of his wagon and shook all the folded shadows free. They unrolled in the wind and flew, each one home, somehow, drawn to the heels they'd been separated from long time ago. Her own shadow flattened itself joyfully at her feet.

The merchant, shadowless still, looked smaller in the brightening light. Mira left him the rest of her coins - not to be kind, but to show him that greedy people don’t deserve their shadows. She walked home carrying only what she'd always had.