Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Vision in Red

She thought of the drawing in her pocket—not the students' copies, but Noor's original, still folded tight against her hip. She thought of the car with the empty back seat. The blanket—or the arm— hanging from the window.

She thought of the soldier at the checkpoint that morning, standing so still, not blinking.

"Have you ever seen them?" she asked quietly. "These... figures the children draw?"

Abu Youssef set down his tea. For a moment, something flickered in his eyes—fear, perhaps, or the memory of it.

"No," he said. "I make a point not to look."

The afternoon was a blur of normal things made strange by what Amal now carried in her mind. She taught fractions to the third-graders. She helped the lunch monitors clean up spilled soup. She nodded and smiled and said the right words in staff meetings, all while the stack of drawings sat in her bag like a weight pulling her toward some gravity she couldn't name.

When the final bell rang and the children flooded out into the courtyard, Amal found Noor waiting for her by the tree. She looked small against the pale trunk, her braids slightly more uneven after a day of tugging on them, her uniform dusty from playground games.

"Ready to go, habibi?"

Noor nodded. But she didn't move. She was staring toward the checkpoint, visible through the school's front gate, where the afternoon shift of soldiers had taken over from the morning's.

"Mama," she said, "do you see him?"

Amal followed her daughter's gaze. The checkpoint looked the same as always—the concrete barrier, the narrow gap, the soldiers with their rifles and their bored, distant expressions.

"See who?"

"The one who doesn't blink. He's standing by the wall. He's been there all day."

Amal looked harder. She could see two soldiers —both moving, both human, both occasionally blinking as humans do. Beyond them was just the wall, gray concrete topped with loops of wire.

"I don't see anyone else, Noor."

"He's right there." Noor pointed, her small finger indicating a spot of empty shadow between the barrier and the wall. "He's watching the school. He's always watching."

Something cold crawled up Amal's spine.

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