Die Spürkönigin

luckily (?), a week-long bed rest allowed me to finish a prose piece to submit at this year's MDR Literatur-Wettbewerb. it's called Die Spürkönigin or The Sensequeen. i started writing it last december already, but only finished its umpteenth edit this afternoon. just in time, as it is, for the MDR competition. as usual, i am not allowed to publish it anywhere until i know whether i made it into the final rounds (wish me luck!), but i figured a paragraph of it in english could hardly hurt. so here goes:

I'll count up to hundred, that's what he said everytime I had asked him how long it would take us to get to the peak still, or rather the topmost spot, really, for the mountain wasn't much of a mountain in the actual sense of the word, but rather a stump hill. For a long time now rain's silver threads had made our pants stick to our knees, and even though we wore soles specially made for that kind of bad weather hiking, we slipped off the fields.