Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

She found nothing. Just their ordinary apartment, with its ordinary furniture and its ordinary walls and the drawings in her pocket that felt anything but ordinary.

But as they walked, Amal could not help glancing back.

And once, just once, she thought she saw something standing in the shadow of the wall—a figure with a rounded helmet and a too-long weapon and eyes that seemed to glow faintly red in the afternoon light.

She blinked, and it was gone.

Just my imagination, she told herself. Just the drawings getting into my head.

But the cold feeling stayed with her all the way home.

Evening fell over the apartment like a held breath. The electricity was working tonight —a small mercy—and the television murmured in the corner while Fadi reviewed patient files at the kitchen table and Noor played with her dolls in the living room. Amal stood at the stove, stirring a pot of lentils, her mind very far away.

Fadi had not noticed anything wrong. This was not unusual—he carried his own weight of the unspoken, his own daily accumulation of things he did not tell her. He worked at the clinic near the old city, the one that handled the cases no one else would take: the wounds that came from rubber bullets and live ammunition, the burns that came from gas canisters thrown into crowds, the psychological fractures that came from living in a place where violence was not exceptional but ordinary. He came home each night with shadows under his eyes and a weariness that went deeper than tired muscles.

They had learned, over the years, to give each other space for the things they could not say.

But tonight, Amal found herself wishing he would ask. Wishing he would look up from his files and see the tremor in her hands, the way her eyes kept drifting toward the drawings spread on the counter beside her, weighted down with the salt shaker. She had meant to put them away, to hide them in the closet or burn them in the trash, but something kept drawing her back. The same helmet, over and over. The same boots. The same hands, stained with something dark.

The same red eyes.

She thought about telling him. About showing him the drawings and saying, Look at what our daughter sees. Look at what all the children see. Look at what is watching us.

But she knew what he would say. He would say she was tired. He would say the stress was getting to her. He would say that children drew strange things all the time, that trauma expressed itself in symbols and archetypes, that the mind was a factory for making meaning out of chaos.

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