In the last couple of weeks, two of Luna’s closest people have texted her, asking her how she was doing, all of a sudden. After a bit of talking, both of them confessed to having seen her in their dreams – but it wasn’t a good one, in both the cases. Typically, Luna is not the kind of person who goes looking for answers – answers to whether these dreams were signs, that something terrible and tragic was to befall upon her! She believed in none of this nonsense.

These two dreams were seen and experienced by people who did not know each other at all, but both of them knew Luna pretty well individually. When Luna had heard the first dream (God was it sad!), all she did was assure the person who saw it, that she was doing well and there was nothing amiss. What else could she do? But when she heard the second dream, curiosity caught hold of her. “You were chased by a serial killer, with some kind of a weapon in a very lonely street, where everything looked dark; and I stood there helpless and crying” – she remembered her friend saying on call. What if these indeed are signs? What if someone is trying to give her hints via her loved ones, to safeguard herself? Suddenly, she wanted to know more.

Luna’s thoughts were interrupted by the loud volume blaring from the speakers of the television.  Since the past few days, the local news channels and newspapers are filled with news articles about a runaway psychopath. The eye witnesses claim that he always carries with him a very clean, sharp and jagged knife. He’s suspected to be responsible for multiple murders in a nearby locality, but the authorities have found no reliable proof yet. If it were in Luna’s hands, she would never have wasted her precious Sunday morning surfing news channels, but currently the remote was in her brother’s hands, so she didn’t complain. She had to unwilling listen to the psychopath’s tale for like the 200^th time since it first started surfacing!

Having a bad dream is terrible, Luna was wondering, but waking up with a bad dream and then REMEMBERING it, is the worst! We have to carry that dream with us the entire day, slogging wearily to ward it off; but instead we rather unknowingly, analyse it and picturize it again and again, on a loop. Slowly, we tend to become so anxious that there’s a constant feeling of dread looming above us, like a silent, floating cloud, she concluded.

How I wish that I could tell the seers of such dreams, thought Luna, that dreams are nothing but fragments of our own anxiousness, forming images and stories in our subconcious mental space. But could I tell them that? she asked herself, No way! But why not? She pressed on, maybe, because, in a way, I too wanted to believe otherwise?

After having their breakfast, her brother turned off the television, finally! thought Luna, to have a late-Sunday bath. After he was gone, Luna turned back to reading her book, which she wanted to finish in time – for her online book club discussions. The doorbell rang. Luna wondered who it was – they had very few visitors ever since the lockdown started. She peered through the eyehole, he seems to be some stranger, maybe a new courier man? Luna wondered. She opened the main door. Standing before her was a man approx. 5 ft 4 inches tall. His beard was unshaven and moustache was unkempt. “How can I help you?”, Luna asked him. But he spoke no words. All he did was point downwards. As she couldn’t see what he was actually pointing at, Luna opened the safety-door to have a clear look. Turns out he was pointing at his right wrist, in which he was holding a clean, sharp and jagged knife, that was glistening with some drops of red on it.

— Suri