the scream

I woke up sweating into the cup of my own palm, my right hand clamped over my mouth as if I had been trying to muffle a scream. I lay there in the dark, heart pounding, throat dry, unsure whether I had screamed aloud or only dreamed it.

I dream often - sometimes three, four times a night. Most of them are dark, unsettling. But only a few I’d call nightmares. There’s one that comes back to me from years ago, when I was ten or eleven. My cousins and I were flying kites in the barren fields behind my house. It was my turn to fly the kite. I took the string and ran, barefoot across the cracked soil. I called out, “Did it fly yet?” But no one answered.

I turned around. The field had become a graveyard. My cousins were gone. The kites fell to the ground. I shouted their names, but the only reply was the mechanical chirping of the crickets. 

I stood there all alone. Behind me, black clouds accumulated and the sky turned dark. In the distance, something stirred. A silhouette. His body was pitch black but his eyes burned red like fire balls. I ran, breathless, down the gravel path beside my house, afraid it would consume me and I would become a shadow too. 

No one came looking. No lights turned on. I ran until my legs gave out. At the end of the road, I saw Tú and Bé, sitting and flicking marbles across the dirt. I cried out to them, and they saw me. “Sister Ngọc!” they shouted, waving at me with a big smile. There and then, the red eyes were gone. But I remembered. I always remembered. Those eyes haunted me for years. I had seen my grandfather on his deathbed that week. I think the shadow was him; that's why I subconsciously addressed the silhouette as him the whole time. Maybe, as a child, that's what death looked like to me. 

But last night, it wasn’t a shadow that came for me.

I had just returned home. I remember undressing by the window. That’s always the first thing I do when I get home: I take off my clothes by the window in my apartment on the twelfth floor. I stand there naked for a few moments while looking down at the street below me. I was watching the cars shimmer like fish in a stream when I caught a reflection in the glass.

I froze.  

In the reflection, she was standing in the doorway of my bedroom. Another me. She wore a strapless black dress, the kind I’d never wear because I'm afraid my flat chest wouldn’t hold it. Her arms were wrapped tightly across her body, more to keep the dress from slipping than to protect herself. She stared at me - blank and unreadable - as if she wore my face like a borrowed mask. Or maybe it was me who wore her face like a borrowed mask the whole time? 

I didn’t move. I didn’t even breathe. I tried to convince myself it was a trick of the light, a result of my imagination. “What if she’s not real?” I whispered. “What if I’m just tired?” Still, I stayed there, naked and stationary. Then, trembling, I turned around fully.

She was there. Closer now. Right in front of me.

I startled. Like a heart-fainted spectator flinching at a jumpscare scene. And I screamed myself awake.

In the darkness of my bedroom, I couldn’t tell if she was still there. But I felt her. I swear that I felt her. Something shifted.  

Strangely, even though fear gripped my throat like a second scream waiting to burst, I fell back into sleep as if something had drained the life from me.

I woke the next morning (thankfully, I still did), but daylight failed to clear the fog from my mind. I remembered vividly where she had stood. And each time I passed that spot, something stirred in me - as if I were walking through her spirit.

For days afterward, I didn’t dare turn around too quickly, afraid I’d find her behind me again. 

What frightened me most wasn’t her cold face or her silence, but the question of whether the more unsettling is seeing myself standing in front of me, or the fact that I was scared of seeing myself standing in front of me. 

What was she trying to tell me? What truth did she hold behind that mask of indifference?

And why, when I screamed, did I cover my mouth as if afraid she might hear me? Is it possible for another self to kill the original and take her place in the waking world? Is she still in my room? Will she come again tonight?

Was it really just a dream?