Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

"His face was smooth like a mask. No eyes, no mouth. Just smooth. Like someone had erased everything that made him look like a person. But then I saw the eyes open. They were red. Very red. Like blood but glowing."

"When did you see this?"

"When they came to our school. They had us sit in the hallway for six hours. No water. No bathroom. One girl wet herself and they laughed. I saw the smooth-face man standing at the end of the hall. He was watching everything. He didn't move. He didn't help. He just watched."

Yasmin stopped the recording again.

"This was from a school in the eastern sector. Military operation. Three hundred students held for over six hours while soldiers searched the building. The children describe identical figures appearing during the detention."

"Not after," Amal said slowly. "During."

"Always during. Never before, never after. In the moment of the violence itself." Yasmin pressed play a third time.

Another voice. Younger. Barely more than a whisper.

"They came and they said we had to leave. We had five minutes. My grandmother couldn't walk fast. She asked for more time. The soldier pushed her down. He stepped on her hand. I heard her fingers break."

A pause. A sound that might have been crying.

"When she was on the ground, I saw a man behind the soldier. A big man with eyes like fire. He was looking at my grandmother's face. He wasn't there before. He just... appeared. Like smoke becoming solid. And he was so sad. Like he knew what was going to happen and he couldn't stop it."

"What happened next?"

"The soldier shot her. He said she was too slow. He said she was making them waste time. And the fire-eye man... he got bigger. Darker. More real. And there was another one too. A small one. Standing where my grandmother had been."

Yasmin pressed stop. Her hand was shaking so badly the recorder nearly fell from her grip.

"This was from a displacement in the northern sector. Three weeks ago. The family was forced from their home during a night raid. The grandmother was seventy-three years old. Her name was Samira Al-Hajj. I've added her to my list."

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