It wasn’t some malevolent paranoia that held back her steps, slowed by a friction that pushed her backward. No, it wasn’t that, but the raw certainty that she was being followed by the very man now walking beside her, his hollow eyes reflecting her own shadow, along the clear sidewalk that separated the street from lush green gardens.

Her impetus had never been overwhelming; her musings soaked her in a deafening materiality that resembled nothing like a dream, except for the whitish, opaque mists that silently persisted in dissolving time, like heat turning water into scattered vapor.
Under such circumstances, the corners distorted as they continued their path. A car attendant appeared then, greeting them as they passed by and exchanging brief words with her, almost imperceptible.

There was shadow at that bend, and although the siege was nothing more than a horror well hidden from others’ eyes, a foreseeable death loomed, slipping through like a fate of omnipotent malevolence, like a dark omen.

She fled—yes, she ran and ran to the nearest park, where her acquaintances could saved and sheltered her, protecting her from the terrible perplexity, from that pursuer and his hunt, whose unfathomable fatality she had sensed as an inescapable destiny or an unfortunate surprise.

“Call someone from my family! This is all a dream, and I need to wake up,” she pleaded with all the urgency of her heart, slapping her face and jumping, trying to make her body react and return to where it belonged.

“A dream?” someone asked, bewildered, while they all scrutinized her, immersed in a rough silence, unable to understand the cause of such turmoil. The LED light in the room where they were gathered was harsh on the eyes.

“Yes, a dream!” she repeated. Time was running out… and the robotized faces of her acquaintances, staring in her direction, seemed to petrify more and more, with brittle scleras and crystalline eyes that could have been hollow in their sockets. Their thin lips remained slightly parted in an expression of absence. A cry for help… could they be against her?

She insisted on the phone call as one gives an unarguable command, convinced that, from that unlocatable place camouflaged within the dense tide of her unconscious, a call might somehow pierce through time and space to reach where she was sleeping. Suddenly, one of the young women present indicated that the call was going through. Several beeps echoed from a phone. Miraculously, she closed her eyes and felt her limbs shifting, her consciousness drifting away from the oneiric gloom, revealing the sunlight trying to pour through the cracks in the blinds.

“We’re back from the market!” her mother shouted from outside, slowly opening her bedroom door.

She stretched, feeling the deep relief of familiarity, finally cocooned under the blankets. Everything was fine, really; it seemed to be, because, after rowing through a clot of condensed hours within the viscous murk that clung to her skin in that limbo, drowsy and with crusty eyes half-closed, she woke up—or perhaps only dreamed she woke up—because she saw through the window her mother walking from one end to the other, hurriedly unlocking the front door, as if she hadn’t been in the house for a long while.

Then she heard her approaching and cracking the door open, saying:

“Honey, we’re back from the market.”