Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

She stood abruptly, smoothing down the bedspread where she had wrinkled it, straightening the pillow, adjusting the stuffed rabbit that Noor slept with every night. Normal actions. Routine actions. The kind of things a mother did every morning without thinking.

But her hand shook slightly as she reached for the doorknob, and she could not quite shake the feeling that something in the room was watching her leave.

The walk to school was fifteen minutes on a good day, longer when the checkpoints were slow or closed entirely. Today was a good day. The morning air carried the smell of exhaust and cooking oil and, beneath that, the faint sweetness of jasmine from the plants that old Um Khalil kept on her balcony, watering them with reused kitchen water because the taps only ran three days a week.

Noor held Amal's hand as they walked, her small fingers warm and slightly sticky from breakfast. She chattered about her friend Reem and a game they were going to play at recess and whether the teacher would let them use the colored pencils today or only the crayons. Amal listened with half her attention, nodding at the right moments, making the right sounds.

The other half of her mind was still with the drawing.

She had seen images like it before—not in person, but on television, on her phone screen late at night when Fadi was asleep and she scrolled through news she knew she shouldn't be looking at. Burned vehicles on roads she recognized. White sheets laid over shapes that were too small to be adults. The careful, clinical language of reports that described "incidents" and "operations" without ever saying what had actually happened to the people caught in between.

There had been one, last month. A family in a car, trying to reach the southern crossing. The details had been confused —they always were, in those first hours—but what stuck in Amal's memory was the photograph someone had posted before the accounts were taken down. A gray car, boxy, ordinary. Something pale hanging from the rear window.

She had told herself not to think about it. Told herself that Noor was safe, that their neighborhood was calm, that the closest the violence had come was the distant thud of something falling somewhere in the hills. She had told herself these things the way she told herself that the dust would settle, that the water would come back on, that one day things would be different.

"Mama, you're squeezing too hard."

Amal loosened her grip on Noor's hand. "Sorry, habibi."

"It's okay." Noor looked up at her with eyes that were too knowing for a six-year-old. "Are you thinking about something sad?"

"No. Just thinking about work. Boring grown-up things."

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