I've been caught up in your magnificent tale, @greenrun. Although it tells a story marked by a certain sadness and pain - the one produced by the loss of loved ones experienced by the main character and his condition as an outcast from society - it conveys an inner peace and even happiness (to use a few words try to express what it produced) given the transposition achieved by Adak (curious: almost Adan) in his life, at the end. It catches us from that excellent bginning of Adak's gaze observing perhaps a small but significant fact - the relationship of honesty and generosity between the child seller and the buyer - that already charges the story of a certain rejoicing in the human. It allows us to know then - regulating the information to the reader - who this character is and his story, through an excellent narrative synthesis, taking advantage of the ellipsis, with the use of some simple resources (the photo, the newspaper clipping), to take us to its denouement and open end (or inconclusive).
I would venture to say that time is perhaps the core and true protagonist of his story. From its title "The prisoner of time" it is affirmed, but more with certain expressions of the omniscient narrator: "He had no time to shave. No time for all the niceties of life.", "Time imprisons us all he thought". It is the real and chronological time of Adak's vital drama in his indigent present and in his past of the family loss that has cornered him, and a time difficult to characterize, between the subjective of desire and the dream realized, which becomes a kind of redemption, with Adak's "disappearance" (transposicon, he said above).
His illustrations are very good.
Thank you for sharing your wonderful story, @greenrun, and also @adsactly for giving us the chance to get to know and enjoy it.