Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

She was falling through the bed, through the floorboards, through the foundation of the building. She was falling through the layers of the camp —past the sewage pipes, past the buried cables, past the bones of the old latrines from the 1950s.

She fell into the earth.

But it wasn't dark.

The earth was glowing.

It was filled with roots. Millions of them. A tangled, chaotic web of roots stretching down from the surface. Some were thin and white, like nerves. Some were thick and knotted, like ancient arteries.

Amal drifted among them, weightless. She could hear them.

Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

The roots were pulsing. They were sucking moisture from the soil. But mostly, they were sucking sound.

She saw a root wrapped around a buried stone. The stone was vibrating with a memory —a child's laugh from a hundred years ago. The root was drinking it.

She saw a root wrapped around a bullet casing. It was drinking the violence.

She drifted deeper.

The roots grew thicker here. They weren't just wood anymore. They were flesh. Gray, petrified flesh that looked like stone.

And then, she saw it.

Sleeping beneath the crust of the West Bank, curled in a fetal position that spanned kilometers, was the Giant.

Huda had called it "The King."

It was enormous. Its spine was a mountain range of vertebrae. Its ribs were the arches of a subterranean cathedral. Its skin was made of compacted soil and rock, scarred by the roots that dug into it.

It was asleep. But it wasn't peaceful.

It was twitching. Every time a bomb went off on the surface, the Giant shivered. Every time a checkpoint siren wailed, the Giant groaned.

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