Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

Amal stared at the words. They were the same words she had thought she heard in the children's song. The same warning that had echoed in Yasmin's office, in the drawings collected from a hundred different children in a hundred different places.

They grow when we forget.

But what did it mean? Forget what? The violence? The victims? The children who had died in cars and schools and hospitals, whose names were printed in lists that no one read, whose stories faded as quickly as they were told?

Or was it something else? Something deeper? The act of looking away, of refusing to see, of deciding that some realities were too terrible to acknowledge?

"Mama," Noor said softly. "Are you okay?"

"I don't know, habibi." Amal smoothed her daughter's hair, her hand trembling slightly. "I don't know if any of us are okay."

"That's why we have to remember." Noor's voice was grave. "That's why we have to see them. If we pretend they're not there, they get stronger. But if we look at them—really look—they have to wait. They can't take anyone else until we forget."

"Forget what?"

"The children." Noor turned to face her, her dark eyes serious beyond her years. "The ones they already took. The ones in the waiting room. If we remember their names, the watchers can't have them forever. That's what Layla says. That's why she keeps a list."

"A list of what?"

"Names. All the names she can find. Children who died before anyone could remember them. She reads the list every night before she goes to sleep. She says as long as someone remembers their names, they can't be completely taken. They can hold on."

Amal thought of Yasmin's file. The hundreds of drawings. The waiting room with its rows and rows of small figures.

HELP, the child had written.

She thought of the girl in the car—the one approximately six years old, the one who might still be in the hospital, fighting for her life or already gone. She didn't know the girl's name. Neither did anyone else outside her family. Just "a girl approximately six years old," as the news report had said. A statistic. A victim. A story that would fade from memory within a week.

And somewhere, in the shadows between streetlights, a watcher was waiting for the world to forget.

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