Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Vision in Red

Amal stood up. She felt a strange buzzing in her ears. The noise of the city —the car horns, the shopkeepers shouting, the church bells—was loud. Brutally loud.

But underneath it, there was a Silence. A waiting, hungry Silence.

"Ready?" she asked Yasmin.

Yasmin took a deep breath. She pulled a small pair of metal scissors from her purse and held them in her sleeve.

"Ready."

They stepped off the bus and into the City of Stone.

Part III: The Phantom Limbs

The morning did not break; it was processed.

At 4:30 AM, the sky over the Qalandia Checkpoint was a sickly, industrial charcoal, lit from below by the high-sodium glare of the security floodlights. The air smelled of diesel fumes, cheap tobacco, and the collective, stale breath of three thousand people waiting in a cage.

Amal and Yasmin stood in the crush of the "humanitarian" lane, which was neither humanitarian nor a lane. It was a cattle chute. Steel bars painted a chipped, bureaucratic blue rose on either side, narrowing the crowd until they were pressed chest-to-back, a slow-moving river of flesh.

"Don't look at the cameras," Amal whispered.

"I'm not," Yasmin murmured. Her face was pale, her eyes fixed on the shoulder of the laborer in front of her. "I'm looking at the numbers."

Above the rotating steel turnstiles, a red LED counter ticked down.

150 allowed.

149...

148...

Every time the turnstile clattered—CLACK-CLACK-CLACK—the number dropped. And with every drop, the crowd surged forward, a spasm of panic rippling through the bodies. What happened when it hit zero? The red light would flash. The gate would lock. The cage would close.

Amal clutched her handbag to her chest. Inside, hidden in the lining of a pack of tissues, was the iron key.

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