Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

At the base of the building, people lay in positions that suggested they wouldn't be getting up again. And standing behind the tank, barely visible, was a figure with red eyes.

Another child—this one older, maybe nine or ten—wasn't drawing at all. He sat with his knees pulled to his chest, rocking slightly, staring at the corner of the room where two walls met the ceiling. His lips moved in a constant, silent recitation, and Amal caught fragments: "Ibrahim, age four. Yusuf, age six. Fatima, age three. Hassan, age—" It took her a moment to realize he was listing names. Dozens of them. Hundreds, perhaps. How long had he been doing this?

"Auntie?" The girl with the red crayon looked up at her with eyes that had seen too much. "Can you tell them to go away? They won't stop watching."

Amal knelt beside her, the concrete floor cold against her knees. "Tell who to go away, habibi?"

"The ones in the corner." The girl pointed toward the far wall, where shadows gathered in the angle between two concrete surfaces. "They've been there since I came. They don't blink."

Amal looked. Saw nothing—at first. But as her eyes adjusted to the fluorescent gloom, she became aware of a darkness that seemed deeper than it should be. A thickness in the air. A weight that pressed against her perception like something trying to push through from the other side.

"I can't see them," she said carefully.

"You will." The girl went back to her drawing. "Everyone does eventually. That's what they're waiting for. For everyone to see."

A woman —the girl's mother, perhaps—put a protective hand on the child's shoulder. Her eyes met Amal's with a look that was equal parts warning and resignation.

"She says things like that now," the woman said quietly. "Since the attack on our neighborhood. She sees things the rest of us can't. The doctors say it's trauma. That it will pass." Her voice cracked. "But it's been three months, and she only sees more."

"The things she sees," Amal asked. "Do other children see them too?"

The woman's laugh was hollow. "Look around you. Every child in this room. Every child in every clinic in every city. They all see the same things. They draw the same pictures. They speak of the same red-eyed men." She shook her head. "If it's madness, it's a madness we all share now."

Yasmin's office was a closet-sized room with a single desk, two chairs, and walls covered in children's drawings. Not the therapeutic finger paintings and happy family portraits that Amal might have expected—these were the drawings she had come to recognize too well. The red eyes stared from every surface, surrounding them, watching them.

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