Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

"What?"

"The car in my drawing. That was it. The gray car."

Amal's mouth went dry. "Noor, that's not—you couldn't have—"

"I saw it." Noor's voice was matter-of-fact, the way children's voices are when they state things that are obvious to them and invisible to everyone else. "Not on TV. I saw it before. In my head. The man with the red eyes showed me."

The pot of lentils boiled over, hissing and spitting on the burner. Amal didn't move to stop it.

"What do you mean, showed you?"

Noor tilted her head, considering the question with the gravity of a much older child.

"When I can't sleep, he comes to the window. He doesn't come inside—he just watches. And sometimes, when he's been watching for a long time, I see things. Pictures in my head. The car was one of them. The girl in the back seat was scared. She was crying. She wanted her mama."

Amal crossed the kitchen in three steps and knelt in front of her daughter, gripping her shoulders harder than she meant to.

"Noor, listen to me. Have you ever seen this—this man—anywhere else? Anywhere outside?"

"He's everywhere, Mama." Noor's voice was gentle, as if she were the one explaining something to a frightened child. "He stands at the places where bad things happened. Where people stopped being people. He doesn't leave. He just watches."

"Watches for what?"

Noor was quiet for a long moment. Then:

"I don't know. But Layla says he's waiting for us to forget. And if we forget, he gets to come inside."

The kitchen was silent except for the hiss of lentils burning on the stove. Fadi had looked up from his files, his face a mask of confusion and concern. In the living room, the television remained dark, but Amal could still see the afterimage of the gray car burned onto her retinas.

"Amal," Fadi said carefully, "what's going on?"

But Amal couldn't answer. She was looking at her daughter—her beautiful, impossible daughter who drew soldiers with red eyes and spoke of watchful men at windows—and trying to understand how the nightmares had gotten inside.

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