Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Vision in Red

ordinary building. Now he was a name on a list. A statistic in a report. A grief that would never fully heal.

She thought of the news footage, the water containers scattered across the ground, the dark stains that no one named on camera. Six children dead. How many of them had been someone's Adam? How many grandmothers were sitting in dark apartments right now, clutching handkerchiefs, remembering the sweet tooth of a child who would never ask for candy again?

And somewhere in the city, she knew, new watchers were standing where they had fallen.

The trauma clinic was in the basement of a building that had once been a hospital. The upper floors had been destroyed in an airstrike three months ago —the skeleton of the structure still stood, blackened walls reaching toward the sky like broken fingers. But the basement had survived, and now it served as one of the few functioning mental health facilities in the northern district.

Amal made her way down the concrete steps, past sandbags and plastic sheeting, into a corridor lit by flickering fluorescent lights. The air was thick with the smell of disinfectant and something underneath it—sweat, fear, the particular scent of too many bodies in too small a space.

The waiting room was full.

Children sat on plastic chairs, on the floor, on their parents' laps. Some were crying. Some were silent, their eyes fixed on nothing. Some were drawing.

Amal stopped in the doorway, her breath catching in her chest.

Everywhere she looked, children were drawing. Paper spread across laps and floors, crayons clutched in small fists, images taking shape with terrible precision. She didn't need to see the pictures up close to know what they showed. The round helmets. The bulky vests. The too-long weapons. The red eyes.

A young woman in a rumpled white coat noticed her standing there. "Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for Dr. Yasmin. I'm Amal—a friend. She's expecting me."

The woman's expression shifted —recognition, and something else. Fear, perhaps. Or understanding. "Down the hall, last door on the left. She's with a patient right now, but she should be free soon."

Amal made her way through the crowded room, stepping carefully around children and their drawings. As she passed, she caught fragments of images: soldiers standing over prone figures, houses on fire, lines of children holding hands while shadows loomed behind them. One girl, no more than four, was drawing with only a red crayon, pressing so hard the paper was tearing.

A boy near the wall was meticulously drawing a water tank—the kind that sat on rooftops, silver and cylindrical. In his picture, the tank had holes in it, and dark liquid poured down the sides of a building.

54