ONE-- TERROR IN THE NIGHT

"Juana! Juana!" She heard someone call her name and she opened her eyes, expecting to find herself in the empty, deserted, scary room but she had been dreaming, a very scary dream.

"Juana are you okay?" She wiped her eyes with her left thumb. The table clock read 6:30am.

"Sorry I woke you up from your sound sleep this early, darling". It was Baron, and he was sitting on her bed, holding her right hand. No, Baron wasn't her boyfriend, he was her biological father-Baron Leon- he had been sitting on the bed for ten minutes, watching her eyelids shut tightly in deep sleep and waiting for an opportunity to talk to her, and so when she had turned roughly around on her bed, he'd tapped her and called out her name.

" Are you okay?" Baron asked again and Juana nodded, sitting up simultaneously.

"I'm okay dad"

"I saw your lights on, and found your door open, so I came in to check if you were up writing or just lying awake in bed. But when I found you deeply asleep, I guessed that you only forgot to lock your door" he said quietly, staring at Juana's frightened face

"Yeah, I was writing at a moment and then I dozed off" and sure, there was her jotter on her bed, lying open. She closed it as soon as she uttered those words.

"It's fine. Don't ever forget to close your door at least"

"I won't, it just happened today" she said and forced a smile, although she was really worried within her;the dream had frightened her.

Deep down, she wanted to talk to him about it but was scared silly at the prospect. First, the dream was bad, Secondly, what was the point in doing so anyway? 

But she called him back. Baron got up and studied her face: "You look frightened. Did you have a nightmare? Wanna tell me about it?"

"No I didn't. I'm fine" Juana said but really wished her dad could probe further

"Okay then. I'll just go back to bed now. Will see you in the morning"

Baron was halfway out of the room, when Juana called him. Again.

He pulled over, put his arms around her and prompted her to talk. Just as she was about to spill the words, two thoughts made their way into her mind. First was the remembrance of the fact that she had a mysterious attribute or what was it? She had hardly heard of anyone with such grace--Having all your dreams come true. She hated to sleep just because she worried she might have bad dreams. Whether bad or good, whatever dreams she had came to pass in reality. She discovered this in herself before her parents did, and they wouldn't have known if she hadn't told them about it. Her Granny found it interesting, she called it a blessing because it had helped the family in so many ways. 

Juana herself didn't think it was a blessing, she found it really strange and scary. She'd rather not know the future than know and not be able to stop it from happening, the bad parts that is.

She remembered having a dream when she was seven. It was a very strange one. She saw nothing, literally nothing. She was walking on nothing and staring at a ball of nothing. There was no air, no trees, no buildings. Everything was blank. She herself felt invisible. She screamed right out of sleep that morning. And it was the morning of her seventh birthday. When Baron and Dawn asked her about it, she simply said 'Nothing' because she couldn't express herself better. Of course Juana had had good dreams too and they made her bubble with excitement whenever she woke up. Every morning either brought a loud shout of fright or a squeal of excitement. Her parents always expected any of the two.

Back to the scene in her room, Juana had another thought. What she had seen was definitely coming to pass just like her other dreams did, so what's the point? "There's nothing I can do about it. There's nothing mom or dad can do about it" she thought. 

She had seen a corpse hanging loosely on the avocado tree behind her room. Fresh blood was dripping in huge splatters down to the pavement. 

"Juana?" Her dad called her back to her senses; her mind had travelled far.

"Err...I only wanted to ask if mom is awake too" she finally said. She was too overwhelmed by fright to speak.

"No. She had a shower and went back to bed. I saw her while emailing a friend

in the sitting room. Why?"

"I'm not sure why I asked"

   Baron patted his daughter's face twice and made for the door. Just as he was about to close the door behind him, he said almost as quiet as a whisper "Your mom will be traveling in two days time. With her boss. To Australia. She'll be back in two weeks, and err...if you wanna talk, we're here for you" and he shut the door.

Juana's face flushed.

That was it. Something is going to happen to one of them. 

"Mom is traveling? In a couple of days? That'll be 9th August. She'll back in two weeks. My birthday is in two weeks. Why am I calculating the days? Why does this matter?" Juana thought.

 Then she reminded herself that it did matter. Bad things happen on her birthdays and they were usually the dreams she had a night before, coming to reality.

  They were usually slight occurrences that didn't involve death but they were still bad. The worst thing about these nightmares was that it seemed there was nothing that could stop them from happening. They were bound to happen and Juana called it her curse. But her dad and granny thought it was fun or magic. Even if it was evil.

"It'll let us know what to do and what not to do" Granny said but the evil still happened anyway no matter how careful they were in trying to prevent it. 

This trait was discovered when Juana was six. Now she's twelve and she's had a bad thing happen on each of her birthdays. The good thing about this was it didn't stop good things from happening. As a matter of fact, it pulled a truckload of good things into her family, say like a compensation for the evil that has happened beforehand.

  "I've never seen anything like death. Yeah death of animals and inanimate objects but never an human. Why did I see it this time?"

Juana believed in prayer when she was little but she didn't believe anymore because according to her, 'prayers prevent evil from being sealed, can't unseal an already sealed evil' because it seemed to her that if prayers worked, then her parents' prayers should have stopped this menace and made her live a normal life like other girls and not live life as some weird girl with a weird power, sort of.

She started thinking of other ways to cope with 'the curse' except prayer. She didn't know how to pray anyway.

She once decided to stop sleeping and be active for the whole day. At night, she would not even visit her bed. She would sit on the only chair in her room and write. About things that scared her, about living life with an incurable curse. Letters to no one in particular. Letters that bore her feelings about her life. About sports and games and everything she loved doing. 

During the day, she would read, play games and watch TV. It went on and on for eleven days. Of course during these times, she dozed but it never lasted more than fifteen minutes. That was not enough to build a solid dream, Juana knew.

After eleven days, she felt worse, her concentration in class took a dip. She looked and felt drowsy during recess and game time. Her eyelids drooped in class and she couldn't see her teacher clearly. 

Her eyes hurt and she felt these terrible aches in her whole body. Juana tried to hide it but it was very obvious. At the end, she got hospitalized and what's worse? She refused to take analgesics because she wanted to avoid sleeping. It made Dawn cry. Dawn was Juana's mom and the only other person in the family that found her daughter's dreams scary.

In two weeks Juana would be thirteen. Thirteen! She would creep into teenage, on the same day Dawn and her boss would be arriving from Australia. Tick! The clock said 7.0 clock. And maybe teenage would bring good things.

 Juana should have had her coffee an hour ago but she was mentally restless. She got up and went straight to the kitchen still in her pink pyjamas. She picked her mug from the rack and made coffee. Each of the members of her family had their own special mug. Plates. Trays. Cutleries. The kitchen was orderly made. Modern, furnished and beautiful and looking new everyday although the house was five years old already. 

Juana's coffee was transparent, lot of water,lot of sugar, no milk. So she could see her face while sipping at it. Her big blue eyes were a bit undefined, her expression showed fear with a mixture of helplessness and unusual calm. Then the dream came again. Avocado. Garden. Branch. Third branch. Corpse dripping with blood. Loose. Screaming. Empty House. Dream.

"Oh my goodness" she sighed, dropping her half empty mug. She tried to make meaning out of it, but it was a little creepy..

"Now let me try to understand it" Avocado. In her dream, she was eager to pluck and eat them. As a matter of fact, she was stealing them. Now that was a little weird because in reality, she never ate them. She hated avocados and even had the one behind her room cut down when she was ten.

She opened her window and stared at the outside of her room. She could see Ivy and Alicia's house down the street. Ivy and Alicia were her best friends. She could also see that the only avocado tree they had had grown taller. It was behind their house, that large house. And whenever Juana visited her friends, she dreaded going near it. Ivy and Alicia's parents made a swing around the tree for the three girls but Juana never played on it. That was even before she had this nightmare about avocados.