A jester chokes at a dinner party and appears to be dead. What happens next is not a funeral — it's a single, increasingly frantic night in which five ordinary people each panic, each assume the worst, and each pass a body they didn't kill from doorway to doorway across Baghdad.

By morning, an innocent man is standing beneath the gallows for a murder that never happened, and only one person in the whole city — a barber who cannot stop talking — is paying close enough attention to notice the one detail everyone else missed.

A tale from The Thousand and One Nights, retold plainly — a farce for readers seven to ninety about how fast an ordinary night can spiral, and how little it actually takes to stop it.