Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Vision in Red

"She sews them on everything," Yasmin said. "Fruit. Her notebook covers. The hem of her skirt. She says if she puts eyes on things, the Real Eyes won't be able to see her. camouflage."

"Does it work?"

"It keeps her calm. That's all we can hope for."

Yasmin moved her gaze to a boy sitting cross-legged in the center of the room. He was rocking back and forth, his lips moving in a rapid, silent rhythm. He held a set of prayer beads, but he wasn't counting prayers.

"That's Karim," Yasmin said. "He counts."

"Counts what?"

"Everything. Steps. Heartbeats. Blinks. But mostly..." She hesitated. "Mostly he counts the gaps. The silence between sounds. He says the gaps are getting longer. He says something is eating the noise."

Amal felt a chill that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. "Eating the noise?"

"He says the world is getting quieter because something is stealing the sound waves. Hoarding them." Yasmin looked at Amal significantly. "Which brings us to why I called you."

She closed the door softly, leaving the girl with her red thread and the boy with his endless count.

"The symptoms are changing, Amal. In the beginning —with Noor, with the younger ones—it was about seeing. Drawing what they saw. It was visual. But now... now it's becoming auditory. It's becoming about voice. About communication."

"They're moving from watching to listening," Amal realized.

"And to silencing," Yasmin corrected. "Come on. He's this way."

They walked back to the main room, past a bulletin board covered in missing person fliers—dozens of faces, young and old, who had vanished into the machinery of checkpoints and prisons. Amal wondered how many of them were truly missing, and how many had simply been... erased.

"He's over there," Yasmin whispered, nodding toward a corner table near the window.

A boy sat alone.

He looked to be about fifteen or sixteen, thin and angular, with dark hair that fell over his eyes and a posture that suggested he was trying to fold himself into something small enough to disappear. He wasn't looking at a phone. He wasn't looking at the other kids. He was hunched over a sketchbook, his hand moving with frantic, jerky intensity.

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