Night Vision

The gypsy woman’s appearance came with a warning...

- Sally Thompson

I’d seen that face before. I’d seen those hands. Those rings on those fingers, those bangles around those wrists.

The gypsy. She was back. And I knew what that meant.

Something was going to happen. Something very important.

It was February 2004. But me and the gypsy had met for the first time in 1986.

I was a younger woman back then.

A dream?

But the gypsy had looked the same then as she did now.

Same raven-coloured hair tied up loosely under a scarlet headscarf. Same full, womanly figure under a purple bodice.

Even her smile was the same. ‘You’re pregnant,’ she’d whispered in my ear. And as soon as she’d said it, I woke up. In bed. My partner sleeping soundly beside me.

The lights from outside glinting into the bedroom through a chink in curtain.

Whoever the gypsy was, whatever she’d said, it wasn’t real.

She was nothing more than a dream.

Except, that night I couldn’t get back to sleep. Had this feeling, this sense that something had happened…

The next morning, I told my partner. ‘It felt so real,’ I laughed.

‘Like she was actually there telling me I was pregnant.’

And I know it sounds crazy, but I started to believe it.

Since I was a little girl, I’d been fascinated by anything spiritual. I even used to give my school friends readings using a deck of playing cards.

What if the gypsy had been real? What if she was a spirit, trying to tell me the future?