Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

She kissed Noor goodbye at the entrance, watched her run to join a cluster of girls her age, then made her way upstairs.

The morning passed in the comfortable routine of work. Reading practice. Arithmetic. A song about the alphabet that the children loved to sing as loudly as possible. Amal found herself relaxing into the familiar rhythms, the drawing in her pocket temporarily forgotten as she corrected mistakes and praised successes and mediated a dispute over who got to use the green marker.

It was during art time that everything changed.

She had given the children a simple assignment: draw something that makes you happy. It was her fallback activity, the kind of open-ended task that let the anxious children work out their feelings and the bored children stay occupied while she circulated among the desks.

For the first ten minutes, everything was normal. Sami drew a football. Reem drew her cat. Little Ahmad, who struggled with fine motor skills, made a page full of colorful scribbles that he proudly declared was his grandmother's garden.

Then Amal reached Layla's desk.

Layla was a quiet girl, new to the class this year, her family having moved from a neighborhood on the eastern edge of the city that had been designated a "closed military zone" six months ago. She rarely spoke unless spoken to, and when she did, her voice was so soft Amal had to lean close to hear her.

Layla's drawing was not something that made her happy.

At the center of the page stood a soldier. The helmet was round and dark. The body was bulky with a tactical vest. The boots reached to the knees. The weapon was longer than the body.

And the eyes were two enormous circles, colored in with red crayon so thick it had torn through the paper.

Amal's hand shot out and gripped the edge of Layla's desk, steadying herself. The world seemed to tilt, the fluorescent lights above suddenly too bright, the room too loud with the chatter of children and the scratch of crayons on paper.

"Layla," she said, and her voice came out strangled. She cleared her throat, tried again. "Layla, habibi. What is this?"

Layla looked up at her with dark eyes that held no fear, no excitement, no particular emotion at all.

"It's one of them," she said simply.

"One of who?"

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