Mkhtwtat-alm-alsnah (2025)

From that year on, the salt flats bloomed with a new village. And on the first wall of every home, the people drew one thing: a single, careful tooth. Not to worship the Biting Year. But to remember: what tries to devour you can also be drawn, studied, and outwalked.

Every morning, he unrolled a fresh sheet of parchment and dipped his quill in ink made from crushed lapis and burnt rosemary. His neighbors called him mad, for Raheem spoke of the year not as months or seasons, but as a creature—an immense, unseen beast that circled the world once every twelve moons. He called it , the Biting Year. mkhtwtat-alm-alsnah

The children who had once giggled at his monster drawings now sat at his feet. “Master,” one asked, “does every year have teeth?” From that year on, the salt flats bloomed with a new village

“The Year has teeth,” Raheem would warn. “And if you do not know its jawline, its grinding molars, its canines of loss and harvest—it will swallow you whole.” But to remember: what tries to devour you

The village elders gathered, desperate. Raheem unrolled his latest sketch— (The Sketches of the Biting Year). His finger traced the parchment: “Here,” he said. “The small bite of the locusts—we are here. But look. After the third crescent moon, there is a gap between the teeth. A space where the Year opens its jaw to breathe.”

The people laughed. Children peeked into his workshop and saw walls covered in what looked like the teeth of some impossible serpent. But Raheem kept drawing.

So he drew. His sketches were strange: spirals of tiny triangles (the small bites of daily worry), wide crescent arcs (the sudden deaths that came in autumn), and near the center, a single dark circle with jagged edges—the great bite, the month when famine or flood or betrayal struck without mercy.