Mkhtwtat-alm-alsnah

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.

The children who had once giggled at his monster drawings now sat at his feet. “Master,” one asked, “does every year have teeth?”

One year, the winds changed early. The rains failed. Then came the locusts. Then the fever. mkhtwtat-alm-alsnah

“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.”

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

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.

Raheem smiled. “Every year has hunger, child. But hunger is not cruelty. It is just the shape of time passing. And every shape can be sketched. Every jaw can be measured. And every gap between teeth—that is where we live.” The children who had once giggled at his

So the village packed. Not all—some stayed, calling him a liar. But those who followed Raheem walked three days east, to the salt flats where nothing grew. The Year’s teeth, they believed, had no hunger for stone and brine.