Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Vision in Red

"The ones who watch."

Amal forced herself to breathe. Don't project. Don't interrogate. Stay calm. "Where did you see... this?"

Layla pointed out the window. "There. At the checkpoint. And at the place where the car was burned. And sometimes at night, when I can't sleep."

Amal straightened. Looked around the room. And felt her heart stop.

At least five other children were drawing the same figure.

Malik, near the back, had rendered his soldier larger than the school building itself, looming over a row of tiny houses. Yasmin had drawn a line of children holding hands, and behind them —casting no shadow —stood the red-eyed figure with its too-long weapon. Even Ahmad, who never drew anything recognizable, had abandoned his happy scribbles for a page dominated by two red circles that took up half the paper.

Amal moved through the room in a daze, collecting drawings, her hands trembling so badly she nearly dropped them. The children watched her with varying degrees of confusion, though none of them seemed frightened. None of them seemed to think there was anything wrong.

"Where did you see him?" she asked each child in turn.

"At the checkpoint."

"Near my uncle's house."

"On the roof across from our building."

"In the street where they found the car."

Every answer was the same. Every drawing was the same. The round helmet. The bulky vest. The too-long weapon. The hands that looked like they had been dipped in something dark.

And always, always, the red eyes.

By the time the bell rang for lunch, Amal had seventeen drawings. Seventeen variations on the same impossible figure, rendered by children who had never spoken to each other about what they had seen, who came from different neighborhoods and different backgrounds and different levels of exposure to "the situation."

Seventeen children, all drawing the same monster.

She locked herself in the bathroom during lunch break and cried.

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