A stranger sat beside me at the late bus stop and greeted me by my full name, then listed my street, my work hours, and my dog's name, smiling, as if we were old friends. I had never seen him before.
I dreamed of a man holding a cardboard sign with a strange, specific sentence on it. Three days later I drove past him, on a road I had never taken, holding that exact sign.
She said her dress was "cream." It was a floor-length white gown with a small train. She arrived early for photos, positioned herself beside the aisle, and told guests she was "the other bride."
Lost on a country drive, I passed through a small stone village where the people dressed oddly and no one had a phone. I could never find it again, and it is on no map I have checked.
Every night, footsteps crossed the upstairs hall and stopped outside my daughter's room. Cameras showed nothing. Then she started leaving her closet door open "so he can get out," and I found the old handprints.
My three-year-old calmly told me about his other mother, the one from before, who had different hair and a different kitchen and who cried when the car went into the water. We had never told him anything.
A guy rode my bumper for miles, flashing his lights, laid on the horn, and finally roared past me flipping me off — directly into the mirror of the unmarked police car I had been letting merge.
I was the only night auditor in a half-empty hotel when Room 412 called the desk three nights running. Nobody had checked into 412 in a week.
A colleague sat across from me in a meeting while, at the same time, three people on the floor below swore he was arguing with the printer. Same shirt, same time, two rooms.
The day after my grandmother's funeral my phone rang from her number, disconnected a week earlier. I answered. There was her kitchen radio, her chair creaking, and one word in her voice before it cut out.
On my third day at a huge company I meant to send one private joke to one friend. I sent it to the entire staff mailing list. All four thousand of them. With a typo.
The pond was frozen solid and every kid was out on it. A cold certainty told me to get my daughter off, now. I did. Ninety seconds later the ice cracked open exactly where she had been standing.
Working the overnight at a gas station, a trucker paid, then paused and said quietly, "Lock your door. There is a man crouched behind your ice machine." He had been there, watching me, for an hour.
