A wave of dread hit me at my desk so hard I called my brother without knowing why. He answered mid-fall from a ladder. My call is the only reason he was not alone at the bottom of it.
A friend took me to a place I had never been. Before we sat down I knew the crack in the third tile, the broken clock stuck at 4:20, and that the waiter would drop a tray. He did.
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.
Three nights running I dreamed of overhead bins bursting open over seat 14C. I swapped my boarding pass at the gate — and met the turbulence from my dream on the news.
For three days my son repeated one sentence like a chore he'd been assigned: 'Tell Grandpa the car is wrong for Sunday.' We humoured him. The mechanic didn't.
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.
