Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Vision in Red

When she could figure out why a car with an empty back seat and something hanging from the window looked so familiar.

She sat on the edge of Noor's bed for a long moment, the small mattress creaking beneath her weight. The room was quiet except for the distant sounds of the city waking up—the clatter of a cart on the street below, the murmur of a radio from a neighbor's window, the bark of a dog somewhere in the alley behind their building. These were the sounds of ordinary life, the sounds that Amal had spent years learning to find comfort in. But today they felt thin, like a curtain stretched too tight over something that was pressing through from the other side.

She looked around Noor's room, really looked, in a way she hadn't done in months. The walls were painted pale blue —Amal had chosen the color herself when they first moved to this apartment, pregnant with Noor, full of plans and hopes that seemed naive now but had felt so solid at the time. The paint was peeling near the window frame where water had seeped through during the last winter rains. Above the bed, Noor had taped a row of her drawings: the usual collection of suns and houses and stick-figure families. Happy images. Normal images.

But now Amal found herself studying each one with new eyes. Was that sun smiling, or was its yellow face stretched into something else? Was that house with the red roof just a house, or was there something in the window—a shape too faint to make out, but definitely there?

She shook her head. This was ridiculous. She was seeing shadows where there were none, frightening herself with a child's crayon drawing. Noor was six years old. Six-year-olds drew strange things all the time. It was part of processing the world, the developmental psychologists said. The mind of a child was a strange and wonderful thing, full of monsters and magic and meanings that adults had long forgotten.

But the developmental psychologists didn't live in Falestinam.

They didn't wake every morning knowing that the checkpoint might be closed, that the water might not run, that the rumble in the distance might be thunder or might be something else entirely. They didn't send their children to schools with blue tarps on the roofs and UN flags at the gates. They didn't learn, from the time they were children themselves, to carry a mental map of safe routes and danger zones, of which streets to avoid after dark and which soldiers to never meet eyes with.

The developmental psychologists would say that Noor's drawing was a healthy expression of childhood anxiety. That the soldier with the red eyes was just a symbol, an archetype, the mind's way of processing fear into something tangible.

But they would not explain why the car in the drawing looked exactly like the car Amal had seen on the news three weeks ago —a car she had never described to Noor, never even mentioned, a car that had haunted her own dreams until she learned to push it away.

12