Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Vision in Red

"I see you. I see you. I see you."

"Noor?"

The girl didn't turn. Didn't acknowledge her mother at all. Just kept speaking those three words, over and over, like a chant or a prayer or a promise.

"I see you. I see you. I see you."

Amal crossed the room and pulled her daughter away from the window. Noor came easily, unresisting, but her eyes stayed fixed on whatever was outside until Amal physically turned her face away.

"Noor, habibi, look at me. What were you looking at?"

Noor blinked. Once. Twice. The glassy distance in her expression faded, replaced by the familiar awareness of a six-year-old waking from a strange dream.

"The man who watches," she said simply. "I was telling him I see him."

"Why?"

"Because Layla said that's important. If you see them, you have to say it. Or they get stronger."

Amal knelt, bringing herself to her daughter's eye level. Outside, the morning call to prayer had begun, the muezzin's voice rising over the city like a question.

"Noor," she said, very carefully, "what do you think these... men... are? The ones who don't blink?"

Noor considered the question with the same grave seriousness she applied to everything —her drawings, her schoolwork, her games.

"I think they used to be regular soldiers," she said finally. "But something happened to them. Something bad. And now they're stuck. They have to watch and watch and they can never go home. They have to stand at all the places where people got hurt and remember it forever."

"That sounds sad."

"It is sad." Noor's small face was earnest, unafraid. "But it's scary too. Because the more people forget what happened, the more the watching-men become real. And if they become all the way real—" She stopped, frowning.

"What happens then?"

"I don't know. But I don't think it's good."

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