Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

"His name is Omar," Yasmin said. "He hasn't spoken a word in three months."

"Trauma?"

"Traumatic mutism. A linguistic and emotional collapse. It happens when the brain decides that words are no longer sufficient to describe reality. Or when speaking becomes..." She paused, searching for the right clinical term and failing. "When speaking becomes dangerous."

Amal watched the boy's hand. He was gripping the pencil so hard his knuckles were white. The sound of the graphite scratching against the paper was audible even from across the room—a harsh, rhythmic shh-shh-shh that sounded like breathing, or like digging. It was an angry sound. A desperate sound.

"What happened to him?" Amal asked, though part of her didn't want to know. Her capacity for hearing stories of horror felt full to bursting, a cup trembling at the brim.

"He was stopped at a checkpoint," Yasmin said. "The one near the northern exit. He was coming home from school. They held him for six hours. No reason given. Just... security checks. But you know what that means."

"I know." Six hours in the sun or the rain. Six hours of standing while young soldiers with guns decided whether you were a person or a threat.

"It wasn't just a check," Yasmin continued, her voice dropping to a whisper. "They made him strip. In the street. In front of the cars, the buses, the people walking by. They made him take off everything. They laughed at him. They..." Yasmin ’s voice broke, then hardened. "They took his dignity, Amal. And when he tried to ask why—when he tried to speak, to assert some tiny shred of his humanity— one of them hit him. In the throat. With the butt of a rifle."

Amal felt a cold knot tighten in her stomach. She looked at Omar’s throat. There was no visible bruise from this distance, but she could imagine the sensation—the sudden, crushing impact that turned breath into pain. The shock of violence where there should have been words.

"He hasn't made a sound since," Yasmin continued. "Not a word. Not a cry. Not even a whisper. It’s as if the voice was just... knocked out of him. Or maybe he decided that if words couldn't save him, they weren't worth using."

"And the drawings?"

"Go look," Yasmin said. "You'll understand. It's not just art therapy. It's... documentation."

Amal walked across the room. The other teenagers ignored her, wrapped in their own bubbles of anxiety and boredom. As she approached Omar’s table, the scratching sound grew louder, more frantic. Shh-shh-shh. It sounded like a code being tapped out on the hull of a sinking ship.

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