Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

All waiting.

Morning came like a held breath finally released. Gray light filtered through the curtains, and the sounds of the city waking up seeped through the walls—the call to prayer, the rattle of a cart on the street below, the distant honk of a car horn.

Amal had not slept. She had lain beside her daughter in the darkness, watching the shadows on the ceiling, thinking about drawings and dreams and the things that children saw when adults looked away.

The routine of morning felt different today —heavier, as if each action required more effort than usual. Washing her face. Brushing her hair. Preparing breakfast. These were things she had done a thousand times, but now they felt like performances, rituals designed to maintain the illusion of normalcy.

Noor, by contrast, seemed perfectly fine.

She sat at the kitchen table eating her bread with za'atar, humming the same song about birds and olive trees that she always hummed, her legs swinging beneath her chair. The nightmare might never have happened. The drawing might never have been made. She was simply Noor—six years old, hungry, ready for school.

It was the ordinariness of it that terrified Amal most.

"Did you sleep well, habibi?" she asked, keeping her voice light.

Noor nodded, her mouth full of bread. "I had a dream," she said after swallowing, "but it's okay. The girl in the car—she's not scared anymore. She's with the others now."

"The others?"

"The children who got taken. They're all together in the place where the watchers keep things. They don't hurt anymore, but they can't leave." Noor took another bite of bread, as if she hadn't just described something that made Amal's blood run cold. "Layla says that's where everyone goes when the watchers take them. It's like a waiting room, but you wait forever."

Amal's hands gripped the edge of the counter. "Layla told you this?"

"She knows a lot about them. Her baba got taken by the real soldiers, and after that, she started seeing the other ones. The ones who aren't real but are still there." Noor finished her bread and wiped her hands on her uniform. "Can we go to school now? I want to tell Layla about my dream."

The walk to school felt different this morning.

The streets were the same—the same cracked pavement, the same graffiti-covered walls, the same vendors setting up their stalls. The checkpoint was the same —the same concrete barrier, the same soldiers with their rifles slung casually across their chests. But Amal saw everything differently now,

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