The Night of the Hollow Moon

In the southern deserts, where wind carves dunes into the shapes of sleeping beasts, the Bedouin speak of a single night each year when the moon forgets its face.

They call it Laylat al-Khalī, the Night of the Hollow Moon.

It falls when the lunar crescent hides in shadow, and the desert grows so still that the stars seem to listen.

Long before the coming of cities, before mosques or minarets, the tribes said that the Hollow Moon was the gate through which the lost returned—those who died unburied, unnamed, or unremembered. On that night, the spirits wander in borrowed skins.

Each village left a bowl of milk and saffron outside its tents to soothe the souls. Those who were careless—who laughed, or looked too long into the dunes—would find a face waiting outside their door: a perfect copy of their own, carved from salt and sand.

Children were told not to wear masks, for on that night the dead sought new ones to keep. But one girl—Mariam, curious and proud—made a mask of date palm leaves and golden thread. She wanted to see the Hollow Moon for herself, to ask why it never shone on her mother’s grave.

That night, she slipped away. The desert opened before her like a sleeping god. The moon hung above—black and empty, like the pupil of an unblinking eye. Around her, the dunes began to move, forming shapes that were once men and women, now made of dust and longing.

They wore the masks of the living—paper, clay, bone—each one whispering a name. Mariam’s heartbeat

hard enough to wake the dead. And perhaps it did.

For from the hollow moonlight stepped her mother, face perfect, eyes wrong—too still, too deep, too waiting.

“Mariam,” she said, “lend me your warmth.”

When the dawn came, the village found a figure kneeling in the sand—a woman with Mariam’s face, whispering in an unfamiliar voice. The saffron bowls were overturned. The milk had turned to salt.

Since then, the tribes mark that night by lighting lanterns made from hollowed gourds—not unlike the pumpkins of distant lands. They call them “lanterns of the lost”, each one carved with a different name, so the spirits can find their way without borrowing a living face.

And if you travel far enough under the October moon, you might still see them: a flicker of lantern light across the dunes, and a whisper that the Hollow Moon is rising again.