Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Chapter One: The Red Crayon

Part I: The First Drawing

The dust never truly settled in Falestinam. It hung in the air like a question no one wanted to answer, coating windowsills and door frames, gathering in the corners of rooms where mothers swept it away each morning only to find it returned by evening. Amal had learned to live with it, the way she had learned to live with so many things—the distant rumble of engines at night, the way her husband's eyes went empty when the news came on, the small rituals of survival that had become as ordinary as breathing.

She was cleaning Noor's room when she found the drawing.

It was a Tuesday, one of those rare quiet mornings when the checkpoints opened early and the streets outside hummed with something almost like normal life. Amal's husband, Fadi, had left for work at the clinic before dawn. Noor was in the kitchen, eating bread with za'atar and humming a song she'd learned at school—something about birds and olive trees, the kind of simple melody that children in Falestinam sang without understanding the weight of the words.

Amal had been reaching under the bed to retrieve a stray sock when her fingers brushed against paper. She pulled it out, expecting a worksheet or a picture of flowers, the kind of thing Noor usually drew — bright suns with smiling faces, houses with red roofs that looked nothing like the concrete blocks they actually lived in, families holding hands beneath skies that were always blue.

This was not like those drawings.

Amal sat back on her heels, the paper trembling slightly in her hands. The image was rendered in crayon, the strokes heavy and deliberate in a way that seemed wrong for a six-year-old's hand. At the center of the page stood a figure. A soldier. But not like the soldiers Noor might have glimpsed from the car window or seen standing at the checkpoint near the market—those were just shapes, uniforms and helmets that blurred together into background noise.

This soldier was different.

The helmet was drawn with careful precision, its rounded shape darker than the rest of the figure, as if Noor had pressed the crayon hard against the paper again and again. The body was bulky, covered in what looked like a tactical vest rendered in thick brown lines. The boots were black, reaching up to the knees. The weapon —some kind of rifle—was longer than the soldier's body, extending past the edge of the figure like an extra limb.

But it was the face that made Amal's breath catch in her throat.

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