Fact: Seeing is believing.
Truth: Sometimes looks can be deceiving. Sometimes your brain tricks you by showing you what you want to see, even if it’s not real.
I didn’t see it until they took the boy away… took Jawad’s body and loaded it into the back of an ambulance.
When they turned it over—turned him over—I noticed how gentle they were. The rubber-gloved hands of the EMTs worked in unison, like a machine, but softly, with their voices hushed, making no unnecessary sounds. As if he could feel the pressure on his cold, bruised skin; as if his ears could be damaged from loud noises. Even still, when they moved him from the culvert to the stretcher, his body landed on the vinyl green pad with a quiet thud. I cringed.
Right before they covered his body with a gray blanket—the kind they’d wrapped around my shoulders because I couldn’t stop shivering—I saw a tiny glint of silver and blue dangling from his belt loop, a flash in the cold sun. A flicker of something vaguely familiar, a dulled hook snagging at a wisp of childhood memories. I shook my head and closed my eyes, in case I’d imagined it, but when I opened them, it was still there: a key chain, a small silver hand of Fatima, a blue and white stone at its center. A promise of protection.