Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

Thinking about the gray car on the northern road, and the girl who had been approximately six years old, and the blanket—or the arm—hanging from the rear window. Three hundred and thirty-five holes, they had said on one report she'd seen. Three hundred and thirty-five bullets for a car carrying a family trying to escape.

She thought about what the children had said. About the figures that appeared at the places where bad things happened. About the soldiers who stopped being soldiers and became something else. Something that watched and waited and never, ever blinked.

She thought about Noor's words: If we forget, he gets to come inside.

What did that mean? What happened when the watchful things were no longer content to watch?

Thinking about eyes that never closed.

And somewhere in the night, in the shadow between the streetlight and the wall outside her daughter's window, something stood very still and did not blink. It had stood there for hours. It would stand there until dawn. And when the sun rose, it would retreat into whatever darkness had birthed it, waiting for the world to forget again.

But tonight, one woman in one apartment in one city in the land called Falestinam was not forgetting. Tonight, she was lying awake with a stack of children's drawings in her kitchen and a new kind of fear taking root in her heart.

Tomorrow, she would try to find answers. Tomorrow, she would talk to the psychologist at the clinic, the one who specialized in trauma. Tomorrow, she would go through the school's records and see how many other children had drawn similar figures. Tomorrow, she would begin to understand the shape of the thing that had entered her life.

But tonight, she simply lay in the dark and listened to the sounds of her city under siege, and tried not to think about the things that might be standing outside her daughter's window, looking in.

Noor's voice woke her just before dawn.

Amal had not realized she had fallen asleep—the room was gray with early light, and Fadi was already gone, his side of the bed cold. From the direction of Noor's room came a sound that was almost like singing, a low, rhythmic murmur of words Amal couldn't quite make out.

She got up. Padded down the hallway in bare feet. Pushed open Noor's door.

Her daughter was standing at the window, her small hands pressed flat against the glass, her face tilted up toward something outside. She was speaking in a quiet, steady voice, the words clear now in the silence of the apartment.

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