Showers of mild rain embraced Eldric’s room. Gentle winds reached his ears, as he grasped blankets firmly. He didn’t want the bed to leave him.

“It’s noon already! Now elevate your head.” A deep booming voice scared Eldric.

Eldric opened his eyelids for a bit. An olive-skinned and overweight old man who had barely a hair. What Eldric had eyed were his brown eyes which were much darker than his. He wore a yellow camped-style collar-tipped shirt and took a hot coffee in a silver metallic mug. It took only a slurp of the sip to wake Eldric up from the bed.

“PAPA! Yo-You are… I mean where AM I?!” Eldric yelled. “Was that all a nightmare?! Am I truly, Dreaming all this time?

“Where you are!” The gruff voice grinned. “Did you lose your memories again? Well, the guards found you half-dead in the middle of the muddy Goldener Forellenweg road. The Albrecht family carried you home with them.”

“No way! I thought I was dreaming! I thought myself dead as giant jet plans scavenged with very bright light in the black cloud.” Eldric explained.

“Well, well, and you were seeking for me in the hard rain, and you mudded your clothes too. I wonder how long you will stay in the bed.”

“It’s just a headache, nothing serious. Where were you yesterday during the evacuation?” Eldric asked him.

“I was trapped with my umbrella work.” Eugene took another slurp.

“What? that didn’t explain my question?”

“What else do you want to hear, son? Do you believe we could enter the school that easily? And do you believe we will be protected from the air bombs?” Eugene’s eyelids narrowed. “War is about to end, and you have guessed that we are losing.”

“Then why did you not evacuate yourself from th-”

“Because, I prefer to die,” Eugene concluded. He then exited the room leaving no words since.

Eldric didn’t lodge in bed after Eugene went. He promptly went to satisfy his stomach with hard puffed bread and a hot enhanced coffee. He still dwelled on his headaches. Eugene had urged him to drink something hot when headaches might occur. He had told me that his headaches were from a cold that he had from washing the cups in the café.

He flitted for ruhiges café with a pair of hazel-skinned loafer that was felt one inch short to his foot. The rain last day distanced a moderate drizzle that poured in the melancholy and sloshed his back foot. He smeared his kneel with mud and needed to wash it before entering the café. Amala didn’t appear. Edric settled on a chair under the parasol.

“Eldric hey,” Sascha hailed him from a vast distance and he glanced at her progress through the pavement. “I saw your house locked and came here to search you.”

“Hmm, looks like I can guess why you came here,” Eldric said promptly.

“Umm, catch me if I am incorrect. Are you f-fine? I am trying to suggest that you are forgetting stuff a lot these days. I came here to know about how you predicted that Vielist would not be bombed last night.”

“I told you last night that I didn’t write this.”

“Then how can this handwriting be so same?! And you can’t even recall that you went to school that day” Sascha took out the shredded page and put it on the table. Eldric handed the page and looked attentively at the details. He went wordless for a while.

“What is then? Why did you come here?”

“I came here to say that you are growing mentally unwell. You know have dealt with this before-”

“I am not ‘mentally’ sick and if you are indicating about your sister, she is not sick either.” Eldric took the word from Sascha.

“What is it then?!” Sascha questioned back.

“Hrm… What if I claim that I was unconscious for a day and someone else was controlling my body? He is the one who went to school instead of me.”

“What if I say that you are a nutcase,” Sascha confused. “And you just said was you-made fiction. You know what, you look like my sister now.”

Eldric grinned and stared at her for a time. “And this was not the only example, it happened thrice last month. It was like I am losing a day of my life sanely, but my body was there who did spend the day I missed. I slept at night and the moment I woke up and check my calendar that I started to mark on it was left unmarked too.”

‘I still don’t believe in what you have just to me.” Sascha sat amazed. You are alleging that you were getting blackouts all this time. Even the man that went to school the day before yesterday, it was not you but someone else in your mind.”

“Yes, I guess.”

“Err, but that’s impossible!”