Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

Amal felt a chill run down her spine. "What do you mean? What are they preparing for?"

Yasmin stood and walked to the window, looking out at the fading light. "There's a boy I see twice a week. His name is Tariq. He lost three siblings in the offensive last year—all under the age of ten. He doesn't speak much, but when he does, he speaks about the watchers. He says they're building something. Gathering pieces. Every time a child is forgotten, every time a name fades, they take that... that essence and add it to what they're building."

"Building what?"

"A door." Yasmin's voice was flat. "He draws it over and over. A door made of forgotten children. And he says when the door is complete, when they have enough pieces, they'll be able to step through it. They'll be able to come all the way into our world." She turned to face Amal, her expression grave. "Right now, they're watchers. They can only stand and observe. But Tariq says they want more than that. They want to be here. Fully. Completely. And they're using our forgetting to make it happen."

The office suddenly felt smaller, darker, as if the walls had drawn closer. Amal thought of all the names she didn't know. All the children she had seen on the news and promptly forgotten. All the faces that had blurred together into statistics, numbers, tallies of the dead that meant nothing because she had never learned who they were.

Every forgotten child, a piece of a door. Every unnamed victim, a brick in a wall. Every story that faded, a step closer to something terrible breaking through.

"What can we do?" Amal asked. "There must be something."

Yasmin laughed, but there was no humor in it. "I'm a trauma counselor in a war zone. I can barely keep up with the caseload I have. And you want me to figure out how to fight... what? Ghosts? Manifestations of collective guilt? The physical embodiment of a world that keeps looking away?"

"But the children—"

"The children are doing what we should have done from the beginning." Yasmin's voice softened. "They're seeing. They're remembering. They're not looking away. Maybe that's all we can do. Maybe the only way to fight this is to force ourselves to look, even when it hurts. Even when we want to forget."

She reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a worn leather notebook. "I've started keeping track. Every name I can find. Every child killed since the offensive began. I read through them every night before I sleep. It's not much, but —" She shrugged. "It's what I have."

Amal thought of Layla, keeping her own list. Children fighting a war that adults had started and then refused to see.

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