The night air in Qasr Al-Nil had the scent of jasmine and diesel fumes—a town caught between the stubborn traditions of the desert and the impatient hum of the city just beyond its ragged outskirts.
Fatima straightened her spine after the final sujood, fingertips lingering on the worn prayer mat as she lifted her gaze to the sky. The moon hung like a broken fingernail, sharp-edged and pale. Sawal's crescent. A reminder of time slipping, always slipping.
Behind her, the blue glow of a phone screen pulsed against the cracked plaster wall. Her son, Ziyad, lay sprawled on the floor, thumbs jabbing at the glass with the frantic precision of a general losing a war. "Yallah, yallah!" he hissed at the pixelated soldiers onscreen, oblivious to the way his mother's shadow stretched long and thin over him, merging with the dark.
Fatima exhaled through her nose. "You'll go blind," she said, not for the first time.
Ziyad didn't look up. "I'm winning."
"You're always winning," she muttered, though the game's tinny defeat jingle contradicted him a second later. His groan was half-growl, half-whine. A sound she'd come to know as well as the call to prayer.
Outside, a motorbike backfired. Somewhere, a radio crackled with static-laden Quran. And the moon, that sly sliver, watched it all without judgment.
Fatima clicked her tongue. "When I was your age," she began, shifting her weight onto one hip—the universal preamble of impending nostalgia—"there was a man named Dadi Tariq who sat under the tamarind tree every Thursday with stories that could make the jinn weep."
Ziyad's thumbs paused mid-battle. His eyebrows did that skeptical little dance they always did when she mentioned the Before Times. "Dadi like... grandpa? Or, like, actual DADI—the hairy kind?" He wiggled his fingers in mock-spookiness.
She flicked the back of his head. "The respectful kind. He carried his tales in a leather satchel older than your father's bad knees, and when he spoke—" Fatima's voice dropped to a whisper, the way desert wind sounds just before a sandstorm—"the whole village held their breath."
Ziyad snorted. "Bet he didn't have to deal with lag." His phone screen flickered neon death as his avatar pixelated into oblivion. "Ugh! Stupid—"
"One story," Fatima interrupted, snatching the phone mid-air with reflexes honed by years of intercepting flying shoes, "was about a boy who stared too long into glowing rectangles." She pocketed the device smoothly. "They say his eyes turned to glass, and when he blinked—" she leaned in, her breath warm with cardamom, "—his eyelids sounded like spoons clinking."
Ziyad gagged. "That's not even scary. Just gross." But his fingers twitched toward his empty palms.
Across the alley, a shutter banged open. "Oi! Some of us are trying to sleep!" screeched Madame Lulu, her hair rollers catching the streetlight like a crown of cockroaches.
Fatima grinned. "Ah. Just like when Dadi Tariq told the tale of the Night Howler—old Mrs. Bashira threw her slipper at him." She mimed the arc with her hand. "Hit the mayor's donkey instead. Political scandal for WEEKS."
Ziyad's lips quirked despite himself. "Fine. One story." He crossed his arms. "But if it's another 'listen-to-your-mother' lecture disguised as folklore, I'm gonna—"
"Shh." Fatima pressed a finger to his lips. Somewhere, a gecko scuttled across the ceiling. Perfect. "This one," she murmured, "starts with a phone that never stopped ringing..."
Far west of the highway's neon smear, where the dunes hum against barbed wire, there's a village called 'Tamaam'—which means both "finished" and "perfect" depending on who's spitting the word. Their electricity comes gift-wrapped in erratic bursts, clinging to the wires like a drunk uncle at Eid dinner. When the lights shudder on, children cheer and the imam rushes to fridge-freeze his sermon notes. Blessings, after all, are perishable.
Zamshed's elbows are slick with grease, scrubbing the communal pot near the tube well's metallic whine. His mother, Shirin, used to wash dishes with river water until his father—was his father—snapped a ladle across her knuckles for "wasting God's pipes." Now the tube well belongs to the whole block, but Zamshed still flinches when suds drip too loud. The village whispers that his father's ghost licks the plates clean at midnight.
Zamshed knows better.
Ghosts don't leave fingerprints.
Meanwhile, kids cluster around Shumona's splintered stool. Her sari smells like turmeric and something sharper—maybe grief, maybe kerosene. They call her "Auntie" even though she spits at the title.
"Listen," she rasps, pressing a finger to her left eyelid, where the lid droops like a broken shutter. "The Nishi Dak calls your name twice at dusk? Don't answer. Third time? Run." Little Aafreen tugs her braid. "But Auntie Shumona, what if—"
Shumona's laugh cracks like a whip. "What if? Ask the widow Begum's goat. Hah! The Nishi Dak ate its tongue first, then its bleats, then its hooves. By sunrise? Just wool and bones." The children's gasps flutter like moth wings against the lantern light.
Somewhere beyond the dunes, a generator chokes to life—three flickers, then darkness.
Shumona's teeth gleam in the sudden black. "Now. Who wants to hear how the PETNI stole my husband's shadow?"
A boy named Iqbal, all knees and defiance, scoffs. "Everyone knows shadows can't—"
Shumona's hand darts out, snags his wrist. Her grip is colder than the well water. "Can't they?" she murmurs. The power stutters back on. Iqbal's shadow is gone.
The children scream.
Shumona smiles.
Somewhere in the dark, Zamshed drops the pot. It rolls toward the well, ringing like a funeral bell.
Shumona doesn't care if the moon is a sickle or a coin. The children come anyway. They drag their bare feet through the dust, drawn like moths to the lantern she keeps balanced on her knee—the one with the cracked glass, the one that throws jagged shadows up the mud walls.
Tonight, it gutters.
The kids edge closer.
She spits to the side, missing Iqbal's toes by a hair. The boy doesn't flinch. His shadow still hasn't returned.
The others notice.
They always do.
Shadows are currency here.
Shumona leans in. The lantern hisses. "My husband," she begins, and the village holds its breath, "carried a sack of salt on his back the night they called him thief."
Salt was worth its weight in blood that year. The drought had turned the river to a cracked tongue. When the headman's stores vanished, they pointed at Shumona's Yusuf—quiet Yusuf, who mended sandals with wire and patience.
"They beat him with date branches," she says, flexing her fingers. The children see the scars lacing her knuckles. She'd tried to stop them. "Left him in the road like a gutted goat."
The fever took three days. Yusuf's skin blistered. He whispered things about shadows moving without men. On the fourth morning, he was light as a prayer flag—just skin and the smell of burnt sugar.
Shumona didn't weep.
She measured the salt left in his pockets.
Enough to slow the decay.
Now, she smiles at the children. "The Nishi Dak doesn't steal shadows," she murmurs. "It collects debts."
Something wet drips from the thatched roof.
Aafreen squeals.
The others bolt.
Shumona licks her lips.
Somewhere beyond the dunes, a phone rings.
The imam's frozen sermon slides into a puddle. Zamshed, crouched by the well, watches his reflection warp in the greasy dishwater.
The pot's still ringing.
Zamshed doesn't hear it—his ears are full of Shumona's laughter, thin and sharp like a blade dragged across bone. The children's screams have dissolved into the desert's indifferent hum.