Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

Yasmin's mother had walked the same route herself, many times, and had never seen anyone matching that description.

Ahmad's mother —the one whose son struggled with fine motor skills and had drawn nothing but two enormous red circles—had simply cried. She had not been able to explain why. She had not been able to say what her son had seen or when he had started seeing it. All she knew was that he screamed in his sleep now, and that he had stopped talking about what he remembered.

"The children know something we don't," she had said, her voice thick with tears. "Or maybe they see something we won't let ourselves see. I don't know which is worse."

Now, in the silence of her kitchen, Amal laid the drawings out in a grid and studied them like evidence. Like the pieces of a puzzle she did not want to solve but could not look away from.

The soldiers in the pictures were not quite identical—each child's hand was different, their skill levels varying from crude to surprisingly detailed —but the core elements were always the same. The round helmet. The bulky vest. The hands dark as if dipped in something. The impossibly long weapon.

And the eyes. Always the red eyes.

She picked up Noor's drawing, the first one, the one that had started everything that morning. Looked at it under the kitchen light, tilting it this way and that.

There was something in the corner she hadn't noticed before.

It was small, nearly hidden beneath the edge of the paper where the crayon had barely touched. A figure. Much smaller than the soldier, much smaller than the car. A child, perhaps, lying flat on the ground.

Lying with eyes open.

Red eyes.

Amal dropped the drawing. It fluttered to the table, landing face-up, the tiny figure in the corner staring up at her from its impossible position.

The eyes of the child were the same color as the eyes of the soldier. The same rust-red, pressed so hard into the paper that it had nearly torn through.

And the child was not looking at the soldier, or at the car, or at anything in the scene.

The child was looking directly at the viewer.

At Amal.

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