Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Vision in Red

She gathered the drawings with shaking hands and shoved them into a drawer. Poured herself a glass of water and drank it in three long swallows. Told herself she was exhausted, stressed, imagining things. The mind played tricks when you were tired. Everyone knew that. Everyone understood.

She washed the dishes. She wiped down the counters. She checked the locks on the door twice, then a third time. She moved through the apartment like a ghost, performing the small domestic rituals that usually helped her feel grounded, helped her feel that she still had some measure of control over her life and her home and her small family.

But the feeling would not leave. The feeling that something had shifted in the fabric of her world, some membrane between the real and the unreal that had grown thin enough to see through.

She thought about the girl in the hospital—the one from the news, the one approximately six years old, the one who might be dying right now while her mother sat beside her and prayed for a miracle. She thought about what it must have been like in that car, in the minutes or hours between the first shot and the last. Had the girl seen the soldiers approaching? Had she seen their faces? Had she seen —

Amal forced her mind away from that path. There were places you could not let your thoughts go, not if you wanted to continue functioning, not if you wanted to wake up the next morning and make breakfast and walk your daughter to school and pretend that the world was something you could navigate.

But when she finally lay down in bed beside Fadi's sleeping form, she did not close her eyes.

The bedroom was dark except for the thin line of light that crept under the door from the hallway, where they always left a lamp burning for Noor. Fadi's breathing was slow and steady beside her, the rhythm of someone who had learned to fall asleep quickly as a form of self-preservation. Amal envied him that ability. She had never been able to turn off her mind the way he could.

Outside, the city settled into its nighttime sounds. The distant rumble of engines—trucks, perhaps, or military vehicles, it was impossible to tell. The occasional shout, a dog barking, the high thin whine of a drone somewhere overhead. These were the sounds of occupation, the soundtrack of her life for as long as she could remember. She had learned to sleep through them, most nights. She had learned to push them to the background, to treat them as white noise rather than warnings.

But tonight, every sound seemed sharpened. Every distant rumble felt closer than it should. Every silence felt like something waiting to break.

She lay awake in the dark, thinking about children who drew monsters.

Thinking about windows and watchers and the things that happened when the world forgot.

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