She was standing in the kitchen doorway before she was fully awake.

That was the first wrong thing. Not waking up in her bed, not the ceiling, not the grey morning light through the curtain — the kitchen doorway, her hand on the frame, the smell of rice and something fried, the television murmuring down the hall. All of it exactly as it always was.

She didn’t remember getting up.

She stood there for a moment with the particular stillness of someone whose body had arrived somewhere before their mind did, and looked at the kitchen. Her mother at the stove. The table half set. Two cups of tea steaming. The window open a crack.

Normal. All of it normal.

She looked down at her hands.

Long fingers. Wide palms.

Her heart was doing something it shouldn’t have been doing for seven forty-something in the morning.

"Yuna, come for breakfast!"

"I’m here," she said. Her voice came out right. That was something.

Her mother turned and made the face — surprised and pleased and performing mild annoyance — and looked at her hair and said "your hair" and Yuna said "I know" and her mother said "sit down, I’ll do it after" and Yuna sat.

She sat and looked at the steam rising from the bowl her mother put in front of her and told herself to breathe. To be here. The refrigerator humming. The floorboard creaking. The ordinary morning weight of everything.

She had slept. She had woken up. She was at breakfast.

This was just a morning.

---

Her father came in with his phone and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and said "morning" and sat across from her and pulled his tea toward him. Her brother appeared in the doorway with one sock on and his backpack hanging wrong and his hair untouched.

"You look terrible," she said.

"Thank you," he said, and went to look at what their mother was cooking.

It was word for word. Exactly word for word.

She watched him go to the stove and their mother tell him he was in the way and him say he was just looking and her mother tell him to sit down. He sat beside her. She passed him the second cup of tea without being asked. He took it.

She pulled her hand back and looked at it in her lap.

’Stop it’, she told herself. ’This is what happens every morning. This is just what happens.’

Her mother brought the rest of the food to the table and sat and her father put his phone face down and the meal started and the kitchen was just the four of them and the food and the grey morning outside.

"You have practice today?" her father asked.

She looked up at him. "After school," she said slowly. "Late. Maybe seven."

He nodded. "I’ll pick you up."

"You don’t have to, I can take the—"

"Seven is late," he said.

She closed her mouth.

She had known he was going to say that. Not predicted — known. The specific cadence of it, the exact words, the way it landed. She had heard it before.

*Yesterday*, said something in the back of her mind. *You heard it yesterday.*

But yesterday she had woken up at seven forty-nine. She had lain in her bed and looked at the ceiling and listened to the television and smelled the rice. She had gone to the bathroom and looked at her hands in the mirror and fixed her brother’s toothbrush and come to breakfast and—

Her mother was talking about work. The colleague. The scheduling problem. The same words, the same small frustrated gesture at the end of the second sentence.

Yuna put her chopsticks down very carefully.

"Mom," she said.

Her mother looked at her.

"The scheduling problem," Yuna said. "With Mr. Park. He moved the Friday meeting without telling anyone."

Her mother stared at her. "I was just about to say that."

"I know."

A beat of silence.

"How did you know that?" her mother said.

Yuna looked at her bowl. "Lucky guess," she said, and picked her chopsticks back up and felt her hands shaking very slightly and told herself to stop and they didn’t stop.

Her brother was watching her.

She could feel it without looking, the same sidelong perception he always had, too accurate for his age, too quiet to warn you it was happening.

"Same dream?" he said, low enough that only she could hear it.

She looked at him.

His face was fourteen and sleep-rumpled and completely serious.

"I don’t know what it was," she said.

He held her gaze for a second and then went back to eating. He didn’t push either. It was a family trait, apparently, the not pushing, though she was less grateful for it this morning than she usually was. Part of her wanted someone to push. Part of her wanted to be asked the question she didn’t have an answer to.

*What’s wrong with you* would have been a start.

---

She helped clear the table after.

Her mother was at the sink and Yuna was stacking bowls and her father had gone to get changed and her brother had gone back to his room to find his other sock, and for a moment it was just the two of them with the sound of the water running.

"Mom," she said.

"Mm."

"Do you ever dream things that already happened?"

Her mother kept washing. She had the same hands too, Yuna noticed, not her father’s but something adjacent, capable and unhurried. "What do you mean, already happened."

"Like — you dream something and then you wake up and the thing happens. The exact thing."

Her mother was quiet for a moment. "That’s just the mind," she said. "You dream a version of something ordinary and then ordinary things happen and they match up. It feels like prediction because you’re looking for the pattern."

"What if the pattern is too specific?"

Her mother turned off the water and dried her hands and looked at her in the careful way that was different from the distracted way and the performing-mild-annoyance way. The actual looking.

"Did you sleep?" she said.

"Yes."

"Are you eating enough during practice?"

"Mom."

"I’m asking."

"I’m fine," Yuna said. And then, because her mother was still looking at her: "I had a strange dream. I’m still in it a little. That’s all."

Her mother looked at her for one more moment and then touched her face briefly with one hand, a small gesture, quick and warm, the kind that didn’t need anything attached to it.

"Eat more at lunch," her mother said, and went to get her bag.

---

She was back in her room to get her school things when she stopped in the middle of the floor.

The room was exactly as it always was. Desk by the window. Shelf of books she’d read twice each. The small mirror on the back of the closet door. The particular morning light coming through the curtain in the particular way it came through on grey days.

She stood in the middle of it and tried to think clearly.

Yesterday had happened. She was certain of that. She remembered it with the full texture of a real day — the dream about the city, waking at seven forty-nine, the conversation with her mother about the teacher, practice and the feeling on the court, her father’s car and the canned tea and what he’d said about her grandmother. Minjung and the window in the third floor hallway. All of it. It had happened.

And now it was happening again.

Not similar. Not the same kind of morning. The *same* morning. Her mother’s exact words. Her father’s exact words. Her brother in the doorway with one sock. The salt knocked over. The tea cooling in the same cups.

She sat down on the edge of her bed.

There were things she could tell herself. Her mother’s explanation, the mind finding patterns, the strangeness of bad sleep. She had slept badly. She was tired. The dream had primed her to look for repetition and she was finding it because she was looking.

These were reasonable things.

She tried them.

They didn’t fit right. Like wearing a coat that was almost the right size — it covered everything, nearly, but pulled wrong across the shoulders.

Her phone said seven fifty-one.

She had to get to school.

She stood up and got her bag and went out into the hallway and told herself that the day would be different. That she would go to school and things would happen that she hadn’t already seen and the feeling would pass the way bad dreams passed and by lunch she would not be able to name why she’d been frightened.

She almost believed it.

---

The school day was ordinary.

She watched it carefully, the way you watched something you didn’t trust, and it gave her nothing to be frightened of. Her teachers said things she had not heard before. The lunch menu was different. Minjung was not at the third floor window because Minjung had a committee meeting and left her a message about it at noon.

Normal. All of it, demonstrably, ordinary.

By the afternoon the tightness in her chest had loosened enough that she could breathe through it properly and by practice she had almost convinced herself that the morning had been nothing more than what her mother said, pattern-seeking, the echo of a bad night.

Practice was normal too. Her coach was in neither of his moods, or a third mood she had no name for, the mild one where he corrected without intensity and sent them home at a reasonable hour.

She did not feel the pressure on the court.

She stood under the hot water in the empty locker room after and told herself she was fine and felt that it was more or less true.

---

Her father was at the curb.

She got in and the door closed and the city moved past the windows. He had tea in the console. She picked it up right away this time, wrapped both hands around it.

"Good practice?" he said.

"Normal," she said.

He made the sound that meant he understood.

They drove. The city did its city thing, lit and indifferent, thousands of lives in the small lit windows. She looked at it and felt the distance from this morning growing, the strange doubled feeling of the breakfast table becoming just a memory she could hold at arm’s length.

By the time they turned onto the street she was tired and sleep began clinging to her making her feel tired.

By the time she went up stairs, she fell asleep on the bed without putting off her clothes.

----

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For anyone confused it was a dream.