Children's games

 I was 13 years old. My parents sent me and my cousin Anya to our great-grandmother's village. Anya was three years older than me, but that didn't stop us from communicating on equal terms, since at that time we both loved to play "Dandy" and guess. And also, after seeing the training in the movie "Starship Troopers", we developed intuition, alternately showing each other a card in order to "feel" what was depicted on it (only cards with "pictures" were used and only two suits — spades and hearts).

That day, I guessed 28 out of 30 cards, and I was wrong only on the 16th and 30th cards. Anya was very impressed, and we decided to test my intuition in other ways. At first, she hid behind a closet and showed the fingers of one hand. I've never made a mistake out of ten times. Then she stood at the bookshelf and poked at the book bindings with her finger, and I had to blindfoldedly determine what color it was. I was wrong two times out of ten.

Suddenly, a suspicion crept into my thoughts that my sister was deceiving me. After all, how can this be? Then I pulled back the blindfold and started naming the wrong colors, and my sister really said "no, no, no."

Then I closed my eyes again and felt an echo in my head. And I started guessing again.

Anya was delighted, and I was horrified. I told her I was tired, and we sat down to play Dandy. We were playing "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" (fighting against each other), and if usually our forces were equal and the one who made the first combo or super punch won, then this time I just mindlessly pressed the keys and defeated her.

Then the two of us went to cut wood. The saw is manual, long, for two people. We lifted the trunk of a birch tree onto a "goat" and began sawing it into logs, so that grandfather could chop them down later. We loved sawing because we loved the smell of sawdust and the way it sparkled—we fanatically collected it and burned it in a bonfire, pretending we were witches.

When we finished the birch, I discovered that I had rubbed a nasty blister on my thumb. Anya bandaged my finger with a plantain (how can I go without it in the village), and I went to lie down. I fell asleep there.

I woke up to the lowing of a cow returning from the pasture in the yard. My blindfold, a deck of cards on the table, and all sorts of notes with drawings (which I also guessed) reminded me of what happened that day. I jumped up from the couch and ran to look for Anya.

She was in the yard, washing her feet in a basin. When I approached her, she said:

—Wow, were you asleep?"

— Well, yes, something got tired after that, — I waved towards the birch logs by the garage wall.

—Wow, did you file it yourself?"

I almost laughed and showed her my bandaged finger.:

— Yeah, one. Have you already forgotten how we sawed for two hours?

Then Anya dropped the ladle from her hands and looked at me in fright.:

"Are you kidding me?" I've been at Aunt Sasha's all day!

It was my turn to wonder how Aunt Sasha was doing. And the maps, and the books, and the firewood? I briefly told her everything we had done today, but she just turned pale and opened her eyes wider and wider.

There was a pause, which was broken by the same Aunt Sasha who entered our gate.:

— Oh, girls, oh, what beauties you are! And you, Anechka, are really lovely, you helped me so much today!

Waving at us, she went into the house and screamed. We ran to her. My aunt was leaning against the wall, holding her heart. When she saw us, she stared at Anya, started crossing herself and wailing something. And then she collapsed.

The ambulance arrived only two hours later, and my aunt regained consciousness in the hospital the next day. It turned out that she had a heart attack. They did not operate on her, gave her some pills and ordered her to stay in the hospital for ten days. All this time, she forbade Anya and me to come to her.

My sister and I were going crazy. I didn't even want to think about anything mystical, especially after our grandmother said that according to Aunt Sasha we were possessed, and laughed (grandmother, though a believer, was adequate).

Finally, Aunt Sasha was released from the hospital. We bought her favorite halva and went to her house.

She said it was only thanks to the sedatives that she could talk to us now. We sat down to tea, and she said that when she came into the house that day, she saw Anya on the veranda. Only Anya didn't look like herself—her hair was tangled, wet, there were bruises under her eyes, and her skin was gray with some dark spots on her arms and legs. And this Anya put her index finger to her lips, apparently so that Aunt Sasha wouldn't scream. And when we ran in to Aunt's screams, this second Anya just disappeared into thin air.

Halva got in our throats. We quickly said goodbye and left. Anya took my hand and we went home.

After that, we didn't think about it until the end of the summer. And on August 28, Anya was beaten, raped, and pushed into a reed bush. When the evening fishermen found her, she was unconscious, covered in bruises, and her long hair was tangled and wet. I've been to the city before, but people described it that way.

I came to her for the autumn holidays. She did not go to the university, which she entered at the beginning of the summer, because after the incident she could not communicate with the guys for a long time. I just sat at home and watched TV.

We sat at the table with my parents, and then went to her room. And she told me something that makes my blood run cold almost 15 years later: the night she was in the hospital, she had a dream about how we were guessing cards, the colors of books, that she was drawing pictures for me, then we sawed a birch tree, and then she sees Aunt Sasha, coming into the house, remembers that this is the day, and instinctively puts her finger to her lips. And then she woke up.

Yes, I could refer to the fact that she had a dream because I had already told her all this, but there is one "but": Anya told me in great detail about that day, even knew that I had not guessed the book covers several times in a row, and which books they were.. She showed me the place where she had plucked that plantain leaf (under a currant bush, although it grows all over the yard). I didn't tell her such details.

Since then, nothing so strange has happened to me. It happened a couple of times that I heard an echo in my head and stopped abruptly — at the same second, a layer of snow fell from the roof right in front of me, or a gazelle drove along the oncoming lane, which appeared out of nowhere, but it could also be a coincidence.

And Anya is fine now. She already has two children, she is happily married and lives a completely normal life.