Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Vision in Red

Noor accepted this, the way children accept so many of the lies their parents tell them. They turned the corner onto the main road, and the checkpoint came into view—a concrete barrier with a narrow gap in the middle, manned by two soldiers who looked barely older than Amal's students.

This was the easy checkpoint, the one near the school, the one where they usually just waved people through without looking too closely. Amal had learned to read checkpoints the way farmers read weather—which ones to avoid, which ones to pass quickly, which days were safer than others. This morning, the soldiers were talking to each other, their rifles slung casually across their chests, their postures relaxed.

Amal slowed her pace anyway. Drew Noor slightly closer.

They passed through without incident. The soldiers didn't even look at them. Just two more figures in the stream of people moving toward their ordinary days.

But as they emerged on the other side, Amal glanced back. One of the soldiers had turned, just slightly, and was watching them go. His face was hidden by the shadow of his helmet, his body bulky with equipment, his posture utterly still.

He did not blink.

Amal quickened her pace, pulling Noor along, telling herself it was nothing. Just a trick of the light. Just her imagination, poisoned by that drawing, seeing things that weren't there.

But she felt his eyes on her back until they turned the next corner, and even then, she could not shake the feeling that something was still watching.

The school was a two-story building with walls painted pale yellow, though the color had faded to something closer to cream, streaked with water stains and the occasional scrawl of graffiti that the janitor never quite managed to scrub away. Blue plastic tarps covered sections of the roof where tiles had fallen or been knocked loose by things no one wanted to name. The playground was a patch of packed dirt with a rusted swing set and a single tree, its branches bare despite the season.

UNRWA had built the school decades ago, before Amal was born, and it had been repaired and patched and held together so many times that it seemed less like a building and more like a living thing, adapting and enduring through sheer stubbornness.

Amal taught the first-grade class—twenty-three students this year, though the number fluctuated as families moved or couldn't make the journey or simply stopped coming for reasons that went unspoken. Her classroom was on the second floor, with windows that looked out over the checkpoint they had just passed. On clear days, you could see all the way to the hills on the eastern horizon, their slopes dotted with the white cubes of settlements that grew a little larger every year.

14