Letter Five

The Year of Our Lord 1112

Dear Nhu,

     I have had the most horrendous dream, dear sister. I know it is uncharacteristic of me to start a letter to you with such a fanciful notion as a dream, but this you must hear. I assure you.

     It was pitch night, black as coal or beautiful teeth. I was standing above a body, but the lack of light prevented me from seeing who it was. It was obvious that I had dispatched this person to the nether-sphere. I, as any rational killer, was dragging the body to the bridge at the west end of the propeerty, to toss it in the river.

     This is where it gets weird, dear sister. I finally reach the bridge, dragging my cloth-wrapped parcel behind me and I remember feeling extremely tired and annoyed about the weight of it. But that's for another dream analysis, I'm afraid.

     As I go to haul the body over the bridge, I see I am not actually on the bridge at all. I look down at my feet and I am suspended in the air above the graves of our parents. The body is suspended next to me, floating a good three feet from the ground, yet laying flat.

     My perceived motion of hauling the oddly weighty body over the edge dumps the body onto father's grave and in the process splits his headstone in two. There is a crack right through the characters of his name, in a way that mars his name unrecognizable.

     Weirder yet, when I finally sink to the ground and go to retrieve the interloping body from father's grave, I open the hasty cloth wrapping to find a body-shaped stack of our childhood toys. Specifically our dolls.

     Sister, I have not seen those dolls in twelve or more years. You are younger so you must have seen them more recently than I, but why was I dreaming them in perfect detail? Is this a sign? Is this a metaphor of some sort?

     I have no earthly idea. I wish for your counsel on this matter. I still feel dreadful and perhaps this odd dream of mine was just another one of my ailments. I do not know. I do not like this feeling of not knowing. I do not appreciate it. I detest it.

     There is a worker in the village who has spent the past five days truant from work in the fields. He has been sipping fermented rice wine at home, according to the village gossip. I think I have found the method of clearing my head, dear sister. Perhaps after his body goes down the river, I will have been freed from the clutches of my odd dream.

Best wishes and please get back to me posthaste,

Anh