The vision hits her in the cereal aisle.

Not a flash, not a dream—just a slow, crawling sense that she’s lived this moment already: the clink of a cart, the hum of fluorescent lights, the way the woman in front of her drops a can of soup that rolls exactly six feet and stops at the edge of the display.

She knows it’s going to happen before it does.

It’s not the first time. Not even the third. The déjà vu used to come in harmless waves—brief flickers of conversations, movements, headlines—but now it’s longer, sharper, and stitched with something darker. She dreamed of glass yesterday. Falling, breaking, embedding in her skin. She woke with cuts on her palms and no explanation.

The same day, someone rear-ended a school bus two blocks from her house. Four people dead. A story too fast, too loud, too final. She doesn’t sleep much after that.

The only reason she’s even at the store is to feel normal, to buy bread, to make sense of the rhythm of things. But normal left the building days ago. Maybe longer. And then you show up.

At first, you don’t say anything. You’re just there. Standing at the end of the aisle like you’ve been waiting for her to look up. You don’t even have a cart. She almost walks right past you—then stops cold. Because your eyes. They don’t look at her like she’s a stranger. They look like you know. Like you recognize something in her face that she hasn’t said out loud yet.

The next thing she knows, you’re outside the store with her. Walking the length of the sidewalk under the awning, quiet. And then you say it: You’re in danger.

She laughs. She doesn’t mean to—it just bubbles up out of instinct. Danger? From what? It’s 1968 in a quiet Southern town, not the end of the world. But you don’t laugh. You just look at her like you’ve seen something she hasn’t yet.

That’s when she finally asks your name. Who you are. Why you’re even talking to her. You tell her about your own experience—years ago, a disaster, a moment you should have died. But didn’t.

She wants to call you a liar. A lunatic. But her stomach twists at every word. Because it fits. The dreams. The visions. The wrongness in her bones. The names she’s been writing down in her sleep.

You say you’ve had the visions too. That it starts this way. The knowing. The flashes. The patterns. And if she’s already feeling it, then it’s too late to ignore.

Iris stops walking. They're under the awning near the edge of the lot, the sun heavy on her back, and the sounds of the town humming just far enough away to feel fake.

She turns to you, suddenly pale, suddenly very still. “…I didn’t tell anyone,” she says, voice low. “Not a soul. But you’re saying—what I’m seeing—it’s not in my head?”

She glances down at her hand, flexes her fingers like she’s expecting to see blood.