HEARD SCREAMS. ALMOST all night. Eerie screams. Full of anxiety, pain, horror, and agony. They came with the wind and danced with the branches of the old and now bare linden tree outside her window. She had tried to cover her head with the pillow, to somehow block her ears, but she hadn’t succeeded. The voices, the moans, as well as the curses and pleas that she clearly recognized in those violent growls had now crept into her brain and had shattered her being. Dawn was approaching and she hadn’t slept a wink. Next to her, her husband was sleeping, calm and blissful, as if none of this evil concerned him, balancing on the edge of their narrow bed, as he always did since her belly had started to swell. “I’m afraid I might hit you by accident during the night…” he told her every time she begged him to come closer, shivering from the cold on the sheets chilled by the dampness. That wasn’t the reason. She knew it. And as her belly grew along with the fetus she was carrying, so did the distance between them. But now was not the time for such thoughts. Other things took precedence. Darker and more terrifying ones.
She got up carefully and avoided the floorboard she knew creaked at the slightest touch. She didn’t want to wake him. At the beginning of their relationship, he found her vivid imagination charming, but now he was used to looking at her disdainfully every time she revealed something she sensed. And this ability of hers had increased – her grandmother called it a sixth sense, from whom she supposedly inherited it – during the pregnancy. Eliza felt and saw things that others couldn’t distinguish. Not metaphysical, God forbid, she hadn’t lost it yet, even though she often recognized in her husband’s eyes, Thomas, exactly that belief. No. Her own “sensitivity” concerned absolutely real and true situations and emotions, tangible things that were there, in front of everyone’s eyes, and which essentially everyone could “see,” perhaps listen to, if they weren’t so preoccupied with themselves and their personal microcosm. Situations and things like these screams.