Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Vision in Red

Amal stopped, gasping. She clutched her chest.

"What is it?"

"The emptiness," Amal choked out. "Can't you feel it?"

She looked at the vast, paved plaza in front of the Wall. Tourists were taking selfies. Worshippers were praying.

But Amal didn't see a plaza.

She saw the ghost of a neighborhood. The Maghrebi Quarter.

She saw the phantom outlines of 135 houses that had been bulldozed in a single night in 1967. She saw the spectral dust of the demolition hanging in the air, un-settled for fifty years. She saw the shadows of families running.

The plaza wasn't empty space. It was a graveyard of homes.

"It hurts," Amal whispered. "The space... it hurts."

"That's why they keep it so clean," Yasmin said, her voice hard. "They sweep it every day. To keep the ghosts from settling."

They hurried across the plaza, heads down. The Key in Amal's pocket was vibrating furiously, reacting to the massive scartissue of the land.

They exited Dung Gate and walked up the hill toward West Jerusalem.

The architecture changed again. Bauhaus buildings. Modern glass towers. The Light Rail gliding silently on its tracks.

West Jerusalem felt different. It didn't feel haunted. It felt... medicated.

The people walking the streets—Israelis in suits, students with backpacks—seemed to move in a bubble. They walked past the ruins of Lifta without looking. They walked over the buried cemeteries of Mamilla without flinching.

"They don't see," Yasmin said. "How can they not see?"

"They are inoculated," Amal said. "The Silence protects them. It filters the reality. To them, this is just a sidewalk. To us, it's a tombstone."

They reached Safra Square. The Municipal Complex.

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