Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

"This is beautiful," she said. "This is important."

"Noor said so." Um Khalil's voice wavered. "She said that if we remember them, they won't have to stand in the dark forever. She said the little ones—the child watchers—they're the loneliest. Because they don't understand what happened to them. They just know they're cold and scared and alone."

Amal looked at her daughter, this small person who had somehow become a guardian of the lost. "We'll remember them," she said. "All of them."

That night, after Noor was asleep and Fadi had come home with hollow eyes and stories of casualties he couldn't save, Amal sat at the kitchen table with a notebook and a pen.

She began to write.

The names she had learned. Adam. Mariam. Samira Al-Hajj, the seventy-three-year-old grandmother who was shot for moving too slowly. The children from the water distribution point—she didn't know their names yet, but she wrote "six children, water point, morning of the attack" as a placeholder, a promise to find out. The victims of the 1948 massacre that Yasmin had uncovered, names from faded documents and elderly memories. Every name she could remember from the news reports, the whispered conversations, the grief that filled their city like water filling a broken vessel.

Forty-seven names. Then fifty. Then seventy. Then more.

She wrote until her hand cramped and her eyes burned with exhaustion. And when she finally looked up, the clock showed 2:37 in the morning, and she saw through the kitchen window that a figure stood in the street below.

It was watching her.

Not Adam —she had seen him earlier, smaller and less defined, still adjusting to his new existence. This was one of the older ones. Tall. Dense with accumulated sorrow. The red eyes burned through the darkness like embers that had been smoldering for years, perhaps decades.

Amal met its gaze and she did not look away.

"I see you," she said. "I remember you."

The figure was still. The night was silent. But somewhere in that silence, Amal could have sworn she heard something. Not a sound exactly. More like a pressure, a presence, a weight of emotion that pushed against her consciousness.

Gratitude. That was what it felt like. Gratitude and exhaustion and the faint, distant hope that someone, finally, was bearing witness.

She thought of what Noor had said. When you can feel it too, that's when you really understand.

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