I jerk upright, breath a pike jammed through my throat, cold sweat sluicing my shirt to the mattress in a single human shape. The walls are wood, the ceiling crumbed popcorn white. No blue lights. No Anna. The blanket is the scratchy standard-issue from the station, stinking of bleach and loss. My hands are clean, my wrists intact, my chest a map of old scars but nothing fresh.
The clock says 6:41. In the hall, Sloane is snoring—his old, predatory, unrepentant snore—and the muffled tap of Ainsley's typing falls in counterpoint to the distant whoosh of the station's ancient HVAC. Someone is boiling coffee in the breakroom. I can smell the burn.
I look down at myself, run the hands up, full inventory: ten fingers, sore knuckles, dried ketchup on the sleeve. I'm in my uniform, not the one from the last day but the first, the one the town council made me wear for the press op after the election. The badge is crooked. There's a chili stain on the left breast. It's like someone rebuilt me from the instruction manual, skipping all the updates.
I stand, try to remember how to walk. My legs go clockwork-thin but hold. I shuffle past the desk, see the manila file folders stacked exactly as I left them the night the world forked. Marjorie's goat, Earl's corpse, the health center "disturbance." I flip one open; nothing's changed. No wet fur, no black hair, just the printed incident logs, neat and plausible.
Out in the bullpen, Tran sits at dispatch, hunched over a sudoku, not a bruise or scratch in sight. He gives me a look, all eyebrows. "Rough night?" he asks, voice normal, plain as rice.
I force a shrug, try to hear the quaver in my own voice. "Hell of a dream," I manage.
Sloane is at his post, coffee in one hand, donut in the other, remote balanced on his thigh tuned to the local news channel. He grins when he sees me, but not the haunted grin of someone who's been through the seventh circle; just the lazy confidence of a guy who knows tomorrow is always yesterday plus hangover. "You look like bad soup, Sheriff," he says. "Must have been some party."
I check the windows. The snow is falling in vertical streaks—not sideways, not that iced-over, wind-shot hurricane of the nightmare, but the slow, relentless ticker tape of mid-winter Alaska, the kind they write postcards about. The phone blinks on the desk, once, twice, then settles. I can hear the faint chime from Ainsley's station, the way she always laughs at her own emails.
I risk a look at my arm, half-expecting a tag, a band, some lingering sign of the last round of surgery. Nothing. The skin is pale, hair growing in all the wrong directions, a scatter of old burn scars from when I tried to light farts on the camping trip in junior high. No blue lines, no injection site, just the old me. The only me.
I'm about to ask Tran for an update when my gut flips, a wet, urgent twist—a hangover, maybe, or the revenge of last night's chili. I grip the corner of the desk and breathe through the cramps. It doesn't help. The world goes pinhole black at the edges and I crabwalk for the station bathroom, dignity left somewhere between the first and second step.
The stall is open, somehow both a mercy and a curse. I barely make it to the seat before I lose the battle, legs streaming sweat, hands white-knuckled on the grab bar. I brace for it: the pain, the noise, the mortification. It's like being shot, but all the damage is internal—a self-immolation that no trauma kit can fix. I keep my forehead pressed against the cold wall, breathing as slow as I can, and try to focus on the pattern in the cinderblocks instead of the slow-motion horror happening at my center.
It ends only when I'm dizzy, everything below the ribs a dead zone. I wait a precise thirty seconds, just to make sure the spell is broken, then reach for the toilet paper. My hand meets nothing but cardboard. Just a sucked-dry brown cylinder, a paperless wasteland.
It's the kind of petty, cosmic joke you expect from a universe with a long memory for humiliation. I almost laugh, then remember the last time this happened—the intern, Ainsley, walking in on me with my pants at my calves, the aftermath becoming the department's favorite slow-burn anecdote. I stand, ginger, and scan for a spare roll. Nothing. The next stall is occupied and I can hear, very clearly, the sound of someone gently scrolling on their phone.
I go full bureaucrat, gather my underwear in one hand, pants around my knees, and shuffle to the janitor's closet at the end of the row. It's empty, except for a shelf of industrial paper towels and a whiff of bleach. I tear off a stack, return to my stall like a conquering hero, and finish the job.
When I flush, something cold and total settles in my chest.
This has already happened. The paper, the chili, the walk of shame. Even the sour note of bleach in the air, the precise weight of the paper towels. Every moment, detail for detail, is a perfect repetition of a memory I'd rather forget. I stand in the stall, pants still half-mast, and stare at my own hands. They look wrong—old, maybe, or too smooth at the joints, like they've never done a day's work in their lives.
I run the water at the sink, stare at the mirror. My face looks like mine, but the eyes are off. Too blue, or not blue enough. I press a finger into my cheek, hard, just to see if the skin will remember the pressure. It does, but the sensation is muted, like I'm wearing my own head as a mask.
I walk back into the bullpen, trying to reset, but nothing is new. Sloane still has the donut, same bite taken out, coffee still steaming. Tran still hunched over the sudoku, pen twitching in the left hand, radio turned down just enough to pretend he isn't listening for trouble.
I sit at the desk, heart throttled up, and stare at the manila folders. I pick one at random—Earl's, the trailer park float, the first body. I flip it open, half-expecting the pages to be blank or rewritten. But no, they're exactly as I remember. The bloodstain in the Polaroid, the date circled in red at the top, my own handwriting in the margin: "Possible animal attack."
I flip to the next file—Marjorie's goats. Same as before. The only thing that looks different is my own signature, which seems somehow more precise, less of a scrawl, more a careful, studied imitation.
I try to think: How do you prove you haven't been here before? How many times can you live the same sequence of days before something in your brain decouples and floats away?
I decide that if I don't move I'll stop breathing, so I stalk slow, soldier-like laps around the conference table, burning off the nervous energy. It's a trick I learned from a therapist in Anchorage—keep motion in the body, or the ghosts get ideas. "It was just a fucking dream," I mutter. "Ate too much chili, spent too many years around undiagnosed schizophrenics, and now I'm ready to star in my own eternal recurrence." There's comfort in the banality of it, like a rubber sheet over a pit of fangs. I keep shuffling.
At 7:10 sharp the phones all ring in chorus—real, actual phones, with the digital warble I installed after the town council voted to save on long-distance. For a second, the sound is so normal I want to cry. Sloane picks up, mumbles "Sheriff's Office," then hands the receiver to me with a face like he's passing a live landmine. "Line one, says it's the clinic." I brace for animal calls, the usual rural chaos, but the doctor's voice is slow and bored. There's nothing to report, not a single case that even whispers weird.
I go outside. The snow is crusted, the edges of the parking lot a solid mass of permafrost. Distant, the tree line is all candied with blue, and for a second I see thousands of eyes blinking back—then it's gone, just the haze of exhaust and sun dogs on the highway. I run a patchwork check on the perimeter, looking for animal sign, broken fence, teeth marks on the trash cans. Nothing. The world's gone domesticated, at least for today.
Ainsley comes out for a smoke break, her parka too big, her mask askew under the lip of her nose. "I keep getting this spam call," she says, offering me one of the menthols. "Unknown number, just heavy breathing. I blocked it but it gets through anyway." Her laugh is dry, papery. "Probably Sloane, right?" I want to nod, but the feeling is too familiar. Everything repeats, down to the bad jokes.
By noon I have nothing to do but shuffle paperwork and stare at the grain in the desktop. After lunch, Sloane and Tran play gin rummy in the breakroom, the same argument about rules boiling up every two hands. It's the same game as before, and the same winner. I take the cruiser for a loop around the lake, scan the bare trees for predators, but the closest thing to a threat is the dented mailbox at the Belcourt place, flayed open by last week's plow.
At the two-lane that loops back to Main, a crow sits on the sign post, fat and glossy as tar. It watches me pass, head cocked, eyes bright and blue. There's a flicker of recognition—not human, but not not. I slow the car, roll down the window, let the static of cold air wash through. The crow croaks once, a sound like a name, then flaps into the trees.
The rest of the shift slides past, second by deadening second. There are no calls. No one comes in to report a theft or a prowler or a goat found dead. The world is a snowglobe, perfectly still. I try to stay awake, try to fight the undertow of déjà vu, but by dusk I'm so tired I forget why I started this lap around the universe to begin with.
After close, the station empties. Sloane gives me a toot on the way out ("see you tomorrow, hero"), and Tran lingers just long enough to complain about the heating bill, same as last week, same as ever. I'm left alone with the falling dark and the echo of my own shoes. I watch the clock tick toward midnight, wait for the phone to ring, wait for a symptom—any symptom—that tells me I'm not just stuck in the world's shittiest screensaver.
I linger ten, maybe fifteen more minutes, blearily scrolling through the backlog of reports I've already memorized. There's a thread of comfort in the tedium, a tactile proof of old reality, but even that begins to pixelate at the edges. I barely remember locking the door, but it locks, and I walk across the slush to my car, engine shuddering as if it knows I'm lying about being okay.
The road home is a mile of vanished ruts. Beyond the cones of my headlights, the valley is a negative, no color but the memory of color, no sound but the scuff of snow on the wheel wells. My house appears as a smudge at the end of a lane, porch lamp on, casting blue shadow onto the drifted steps. I never leave that porch lamp burning. Never.
Inside I dump my boots, peel off uniform, shuffle into the kitchen and stand with my palms pressed to the Formica, waiting for some muscle memory of domestic life to animate my next move. There should be a pizza box on the counter, the same half-eaten slice congealing in the box, but tonight it's spotless. Not even a crumb. I open the fridge: sodas, a tray of eggs, one half-gone carton of orange juice. None of it looks familiar, but I know it's mine.
My phone, plugged in above the toaster, vibrates once—no name, just "Unknown Caller." I watch it, willing the number to pixelate into something I could hate or love, but it only blinks, then stops. For a second, I consider calling it back, just to see if the ring on the other end is my own.
Bedroom: the bed is made, corners squared, not my style, more the work of a military mother or a hotel maid. I check the closet and all my clothes are hung in exact color code: blue, blue, green, blue, brown. The jeans are new, tags still on the rear belt loop, as if someone intended me to discover them when I was more myself.
The rest of the house is as deathly quiet as a casino at dawn. I walk the perimeter, check every latch, every window, the way I used to after break-ins made the news. Then I go back to the kitchen, pour a glass of orange juice, taste it—real enough, bright enough to make my tongue recoil. I drain it in three swigs, wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. Nothing chasing in the aftertaste but acid and the faint raw sweet of old fruit.
I go to the living room, drop onto the couch, and turn on the TV, knowing it will only serve up the local weather or the tail end of a rerun I never liked. But I need the noise. I need something to tell me that my own mind isn't the last broadcast in town.
I fold some blankets around me, click through three channels, then leave it on mute. The ceiling blurs into a streaky confusion, and I let myself drift, not sleep but something close. I dream of walking through the woods at night, flashlight dull, snow falling so thick the air is a paste. I see footprints, coyote at first, then doubling in size, then flip to biped. In the dream, I follow them anyway, knowing every animal is just a ghost in training.
When the knock comes, it's a feather touch, unreal. I jerk upright, the room a whorl of static, mouth sticky with the taste of something halfway between hunger and sickness. I check the clock: 2:13 a.m.
The knock comes again, firmer now. Three precise taps, just like in the dream. I listen for a voice, a shadow, a joke, but there's nothing but the cold building in the marrow of the house, like a rumor of winter not yet arrived.
I get up, body sore like I ran a marathon, and pad to the door, fixing my eyes to the peephole. For five whole beats, I see nothing—just the strange, fish-eye stretch of porch and snow, yellowed by the lamp. Then, a figure. Small, brittle-looking against the suburban dark.
It's Anna. Not Anna. The way her mouth bends sideways in a practiced smile, the way her eyes never quite meet the glass, the way her arm hitches twice before she remembers to knock again. I press my head to the wood, certain the dream hasn't let me go.
She knocks again, three times, and whispers: "Kamen?" The inflection is right, but the tone is a gloss, like someone playing her from a deep, blank cassette.
I turn the deadbolt, hand trembling, and open the door two inches. "Anna?" I croak.
She stands at the threshold, wrapped in a blue parka, hospital wristband loose at her cuff. Her hair is wild, but it's hers. Her face too thin, eyes sunk deep, but it's still her geometry. She sways a little, then brings her hands to her chest, fingers interlaced in a grip I remember from the first year we dated.
"It's cold," she says, shivering the word so that it rides the air straight into my lungs.
I step back, let her in.
She blinks at the floor, eyes tracking the cheap laminate that she once called "criminally ugly." There's a smell to her, not antiseptic or blood, just a faint ozone, like the space inside a circuit breaker panel. She doesn't speak, just steps to the kitchen and stands, arms crossed, jaw set.
I close the door, running the lock out of habit, and say, "You're supposed to be dead."
She shakes her head. "I don't think I am."
I want to hug her, want to shake her, want to demand the answer to every impossible question at once. Instead, I just lean against the fridge and let her collect the words at her own speed.
"Anna, what happened?" I manage. "I saw—" I choke, rolling the memory through mud in my mouth. "I saw you. I saw you die."
Anna laughs, a high, dry scrape—like sandpaper on the wind—then just steps forward and hugs me, squeezing so tight all the stories in my bones evacuate at once. She kisses me, lips warm, a real human pulse in the middle, and then breaks to float into the kitchen. "Honestly, Mitchell, if I wasn't here, you'd have died of sodium before the wolves got you. There's ramen in the pantry. And eggs. I think you should eat before you pass out." She slides open a cabinet, excavates a battered pan, and starts foraging for the thing that makes the most noise when it hits metal.
I stand there. Maybe five seconds, maybe an hour. There's a sick ringing in my ears, not like blood pressure but like feedback at the world's edge. My head hurts, crown to jaw, worse with every heartbeat. In the back of my eyes there's a rerun: Anna in a suit, Anna at a podium, Anna in a cage, Anna bleeding out. But the thing in the kitchen is Anna, with her hair in a mess, her left sock half-off, talking to herself about the idiocy of modern stovetops.
I want to scream. I want to shake her. I want to ask, which version are you? But she's humming—flat, tuneless, her way of bullying silence into submission—and my legs walk me to her, arms a span's width around the glow of her shoulders. I watch the way her hands slice eggs, the knuckles still chapped from last winter's cold. I watch the blue vein in her wrist, running perpendicular to where the hospital band used to be.
She finishes beating the eggs, flicks yolk from her fingers, and without looking up says, "I'm not hungry, but you need to eat. You look like a ghost." She cracks a smile, twisting her mouth all the way left, and for a second I can't tell if she's a memory or a miracle.
"Anna," I say, voice not my own. "What happened to you? What happened to me?" My hand can't stop shaking. I try to steady it on the counter and the Formica shows a thin film of sweat where I touch.
She looks at me, a half smile peeling up at the corners. "Did you forget your medication again? You always get a little weird when you miss a day," she says, and it's enough like the real Anna that my heart does a full somersault. Her eyes flick up, catch mine, and for a split second I believe there never was any nightmare, never any crawlspace, never a matron counting down the days.
She makes eggs: the way she always did, with too much cream and a pinch of salt, pinched between her thumb and forefinger, like she's warding off evil spirits. The skillet hisses. She cracks a plastic spatula against the rim for rhythm, then sets the table with a plate—just one, always just one. I want to ask why, but my mouth is full of static.
I watch her. Every motion, the way she sways at the hip, the little sketch of her tongue when she tastes the air for burning. Real Anna, the Anna I loved, never wore hospital bands or said sentences like "they want to see how many times you'll adapt before you break." Real Anna didn't die in a tank, didn't split her jaw in my face. The Anna in my kitchen is the only Anna I want to remember. I decide I will take the trade.
She hands me the plate, sits opposite, elbows on the Formica. "So what's on your mind, Kamen?" she asks, and there it is: the familiar music, all vowels softened with mischief, the consonants hitting like a dare.
I set down my fork. My hands are still shaking. "I keep having these dreams," I say. "I think I'm stuck in them. Or maybe the dreams are stuck with me." I watch her eyes, expecting them to go glassy, to shape-shift, to blue out into some chemical impossible. Instead, she just nods, like she's heard it a hundred times before.
"Do you remember when we got snowed in, two winters ago? You said you could feel the cabin's history in the way the rafters groaned. Said it was like sharing a brain with every dumb animal that ever froze to death up here." She cocks her head. "Maybe it's just that, honey. Maybe you're not stuck. Maybe you're just carrying around an old virus."
I laugh, too sharp. "Or I'm the virus, and the world is waiting for me to get bored and die out." I shovel a bite of eggs into my mouth, savor the scald and the salt. It tastes like the end of a hunt, like coming home.
She taps a knuckle on the table. "If you were a virus, you'd be the lazy kind. The one that sits around hoping someone else does the real mutation for them." The look she gives me isn't love or even nostalgia. It's diagnosis.
I want to reach for her hand, but the sweat comes back, starts in the palms and creeps up the wrist, hot and unreal. "What if I'm not me?" I ask. "What if I'm just a memory someone left on the copier overnight?"
Anna shrugs, like the answer floats right above my head. "We're all just stories we tell each other. If you remember to eat, and remember to come home, and remember my favorite movie, then you did something right." She smiles again, but this time I see the fray at the edges, the way her eyes want so badly to hold shape.
The silence after is thick with a bad joke. I stare at the window, watching the snow pile up against the porch lamp, and try to imagine what would happen if I stepped outside. Would the world hold? Would the air stop, just short of my nose, and ask for a password? Or would I simply find myself back at the station, running through the same thirty-two hours until I learned whatever lesson the dream wants me to learn?
Anna stands, rinses the plate. She wipes her hands, then mine, with the old dish rag. Closer, she smells like herself, the old perfume, the pocket-lint of bitter coffee, the undertone of wool. She sets a hand on my cheek. "You're running on empty," she whispers. "Why don't you take a nap? I'll be here when you wake up."
She's not lying. I know it. Tomorrow, maybe, she'll disappear again. Maybe she'll split at the jaw and tell me the experiment is over. But tonight, she's here, and I am starving for the part of her that remembers me before all the bad endings.
I let her lead me to the bedroom. The lamp is on, amber and soft, and the blankets are already turned back. I crawl under, expecting a chill, but the sheets are warm, and the pillow smells like everything I ever forgave about this world.
Anna curls next to me, her head braced at my collarbone. She hums, and the tune is so off-key it nearly hurts, but I want her to keep singing, keep making up verses, keep me anchored to the dream as long as possible.
I close my eyes, and for the first time in a year I drift not into ash and discord, but into the quiet peace of ordinary things. A kitchen full of yellow light. A half-cooked breakfast. A woman who knows my worst symptom and makes it food.
I wake up three hours later, and she's still there, breathing slow, daylight rolling orange through the gap in the curtains. Outside, someone's shoveling the walk, the scrape of metal on concrete a pulse to prove things still move forward. I let myself wonder if that someone is me.
I watch her sleep, fingers curled at her chin, lips parted in a dream state I hope is better than mine. I want to ask her if she remembers the tank, the glass, the blue-eyed doppelgangers. I want to ask if she knows about the knife, about the blood, about what I did to keep her alive this time through. But I let her sleep.
I get up, make coffee, drink it at the window, counting crows until the sky goes pink with dawn. I dial the station, tell Sloane I'm taking a half-day, that my wife needs me home and the paperwork can wait. He grunts the affirmative and hangs up, not even a joke this time.
I make breakfast. This time, eggs for two. I set the salt between us, just the way she likes. When Anna wakes, she kisses my hair and laughs, says "I dreamed you were a superhero, but your only power was making breakfast taste good." I tell her that's the best dream I've ever heard.
We eat, and outside the snow keeps falling, and for a second—just one—I start to believe that this time, maybe, the cycle is finished. Maybe the world only wanted to see if I could tell the difference between ghosts and family.
When the next storm comes, I hold her tight, and I let the dream go wherever it wants to go, as long as it comes back to her in the end.