Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Vision in Red

She looked for too long. She knew it was dangerous, knew that acknowledging them changed something, but she couldn't look away. And as she watched, she became aware that the watcher was watching her back. That something was passing between them—recognition, perhaps, or acknowledgment, or the terrible intimacy of two beings who both knew what the other was seeing.

The watcher didn't move. But his eyes seemed to brighten, just for a moment, as if her attention had fed something inside him.

Amal forced herself to keep walking.

At the checkpoint, where soldiers waved cars through with bored indifference, two more watchers stood behind the concrete barrier. They were different from the one in the ruins—newer, perhaps, or less completely formed. Their shapes were indistinct, wavering at the edges like heat mirages. But the eyes were the same. Always the same.

The soldiers didn't see them. That was obvious from the way they moved, the way they chatted with each other, the way they scratched their faces and shifted their weight and did all the ordinary things that living people did without awareness of the figures looming behind them. But the watchers saw everything. They watched every car that passed, every person that walked by, every small interaction and confrontation and moment of tension. They were counting something, Amal realized. Keeping track.

At the corner where a building had been demolished last month, three of them gathered in the rubble. They were different sizes, different degrees of solidity. The oldest was nearly opaque, his form dense and dark against the gray debris. He might have been standing there for years. The youngest was barely visible, a shimmer of grief against the afternoon light, so new that Amal could almost see through him to the broken stones behind.

She thought about what Yasmin had said. They appear during the violence, not after. How recent was this one? Days? Hours?

At the entrance to her own building, where Um Khalil's grandson used to play football with the other children, a new one stood. Small. Child-sized. Watching the courtyard with eyes that hadn't quite turned red yet.

Adam.

Amal stopped, her feet rooted to the pavement. The figure saw her looking —she was certain of it— and something passed between them. Recognition. Acknowledgment. The terrible intimacy of seeing and being seen.

He was different from the adult watchers she had seen. Less solid, less defined, as if he hadn't yet learned how to hold his shape in this new existence. His eyes were brown—still brown, the warm

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