Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

Yasmin pushed the door open.

The room was filled with reels of magnetic tape. Thousands of them. Stacks of cassettes from the 80s. Reels of film from the 40s.

But the sound...

The room was vibrating.

Amal stepped closer to a shelf. She put her ear near a reel of tape marked Jaffa 1948 - Interview 4.

She didn't need a player. The tape was whispering.

Please... my son... he is inside...

She moved to another reel. Deir Yassin.

Get out! They are coming!

The whole room was a chorus of trapped screams. The magnetic tape had absorbed the terror of the voices it recorded.

"They didn't just record the history," Yasmin said, her face white. "They trapped the ghosts in the plastic."

Amal saw a large machine in the corner. A bulk eraser. A giant magnet.

"And that," Amal pointed, "is the execution chamber. When they decide a memory is too dangerous... they wipe the tape."

"Let's go," Yasmin said. "I can't breathe in here."

They backed out of the room, closing the door on the whispering tapes.

They returned to the main aisle.

She stopped.

She felt a chill verify the back of her neck.

"Yasmin."

"What?"

"Look at the floor."

Yasmin looked down.

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