Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

They say thank you.

They say the silence is building something.

They say they are hungry for more.

The words written at the bottom of the page took on a new, terrible weight.

"We have to go there," Amal said again, the decision hardening in her chest. "To the northern checkpoint."

"Now?"

"Yes. While the memory is fresh. While I can still feel what he felt." She looked at Omar, who was still drawing, still trapped in his silent prison. "We need to see what they're building."

The drive to the northern checkpoint was quiet.

Amal drove, her hands tight on the steering wheel, leaving white knuckled impressions in the leather. Yasmin sat in the passenger seat, staring out the window at the devastating landscape. The olive groves that had been uprooted, their ancient, gnarled roots exposed to the sun like dry bones. The houses that had been demolished, reduced to piles of gray rubble where colorful laundry once hung. The new settlements on the hilltops, gleaming white and fortress-like, watching over the valley like predators waiting for the right moment to strike.

"Why are we going there?" Yasmin asked eventually. Her voice was small, stripped of its usual professional confidence. "If you believe Omar... if the checkpoint is what he says it is..."

"I need to see it," Amal said. "I need to look at it with open eyes. The children —Tariq, Noor, Omar— their vision is pure. It hasn't been clouded by years of compromise and survival. But we've been looking at it for so long we've stopped seeing it. We just see concrete and soldiers. We see the obstacle, not the monster."

"And if you see the monster?"

"Then we'll know what we're fighting."

They parked the car a kilometer away, in the chaotic, dusty lot where taxi drivers smoked cheap cigarettes and drank bitter coffee, waiting for the exhausted workers coming through the crossing. The air smelled of diesel fumes and dust and the sharp, metallic tang of ozone —a smell that shouldn't be there, not in the open air, but which hung over the area like a shroud.

They walked the rest of the way. The sun beat down on the asphalt, radiating heat that shimmered in waves.

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