What's Haunting Me?

Remember- Mai

   My adoptive mother Sakuro sits with me at 3:30 A.M. , helping to slow my heaving breaths. For the fifth night in a row, I'd woken up screaming from The Nightmare. Every August 6th since I can remember, I've had the same nightmare, except I can't remember what it's about.  I only remember one thing: pure terror, like nothing I've ever felt outside of the dreams, at least that I can remember. I had amnesia when I was nine, and I don't remember anything before that. The earliest thing I remember is waking up on a hospital bed, Sakuro and her husband Takeshi  there to greet me. They said they'd found me alone, unconscious on the road a week earlier. They'd tried to find my parents or another family member, but no one turned up. Mom and Dad somehow got legal permission to adopt me by then, and even though that doesn't make sense, no one else has ever even hinted to something different. That was August 13th, 1945. It's now August 11th, 1961, two days from my 6th anniversary with my family and my memory. I have a theory about my nightmares, though I've never told another soul about it. I think The Nightmare may be related to what happened to me all those years ago. I haven't told Mom and Dad because neither of them like to talk about Before, maybe because of Kana, their daughter who died two weeks before they adopted me. She would've been about my age, had she not died in the accident that killed my aunt, uncle, and their young daughter, Toru. They were not blood relatives of mine, and I never knew them, but we all count each other as family, blood or not. Hiroshi, my cousin, is the only one that survived, and it's thanks to that accident that I'm here. Mom and Dad couldn't bear to see anyone's child without a family, when they had just lost theirs. They would've adopted Hiroshi too, had Cho and Michi, his godparents, not stepped in. Hiro had amnesia too, though he only lost nine months, not nine years. Cho and Michi alternate homeschooling us while my parents are at work, and Cho or Michi running their business from home. Hiro has these nightmares too. We've been on a small break because Hiro's family went on vacation, but we start again tomorrow, or today, I guess. I wonder if he's been having this repeated nightmare?