Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Vision in Red

There were people watching. Women from my neighborhood. Girls from my school. A man in a taxi was filming with his phone. The soldier saw him and smashed the phone. Then he laughed.

I stood there. I was naked. I was crying. I tried to cover myself with my hands. The soldier hit my hands with his rifle. He said to put them down. He said look at me.

I looked at him. And that's when I saw the Thing behind him.

It wasn't a soldier. It was tall and black and empty. It had red eyes. It was standing right behind him, leaning over his shoulder. Its hands were on his neck. It was whispering to him.

The soldier stopped laughing. His face went blank. He looked at me, but his eyes were empty. He raised the rifle.

I tried to scream. I tried to say no. I opened my mouth.

And the Thing moved.

It moved so fast. It stepped through the soldier. It stepped into me. It put its hand down my throat and it pulled.

It hurt. It hurt more than the hitting. It felt like something was being ripped out of my chest. I felt my voice break. I felt it snap like a dry branch.

Then there was silence.

The soldier hit me in the throat. I fell down. But I didn't make a sound. The Thing was holding my voice in its hand. It looked at me. It smiled.

It put my voice in a box in its chest. And then it walked away.

Amal lowered the paper. Her hands were trembling.

"He saw it take his voice," she whispered. "He actually saw it."

"He believes it," Yasmin said. "Metaphorically, physically... to him, it's real. The trauma was so severe it manifested as a theft. A physical extraction."

"But the part about the soldier," Amal said. "The watcher whispering to him? Controlling him?"

"That's the part that terrifies me," Yasmin admitted. "We've always thought of the watchers as passive. They appear where violence happens. But Omar is saying something else. He's saying they cause it. Or at least, that they encourage it."

Amal looked back at the drawing on the table—the boy, the laughing soldiers, the whispering shadow.

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