After a dozen steps, she glanced back.
Ruth remained by the mailbox, letters clutched to her chest, watching the street stretch away. Amara's mind filled in stories the world didn't confirm, but she didn't need Ruth to see them. That space belonged only to her.
Amara took three more strides. Milo's leash tugged lightly, his paws quick on the wet pavement. Something, some tug behind the ribs, made her slow. She turned again.
Ruth was still there, but her posture had shifted: chin lifted a fraction, eyes trained not on the street but squarely on Amara. The gray morning pooled around the woman like diluted ink.
Amara lifted her free hand in a belated wave, a casual final goodbye.
"See you, Ruth," she called, voice carrying thin through the damp air.
Then..... The world blinked.
Color drained as if a bulb had sputtered in its socket. The dripping maples flattened to charcoal silhouettes. Even the leash between Amara's fingers felt less real, as though she held only the memory of leather.
A faint tremor slid along her spine. She rubbed her forehead hard, the way she usually banishes a stubborn headache. "Not now," she murmured. "It's just the weather. Just a flash."
When her eyes cleared, Ruth had stepped off the curb.
"Amara?" The voice was closer than it should have been. Concern, yes, but layered with something steadier, a practiced calm. "Are you feeling all right?"
A low electrical hum began, faint at first, then rising until it pulsed with the beat of Amara's heart.
"I...yeah. Fine. Just… sun in my eyes." But there was no sun, only a pewter sky pressing low and heavy.
Ruth came closer, the edges of her cardigan paling as she moved. The soft heather gray bled toward white, bleaching as though the color itself were draining away.
Amara blinked hard. "It's nothing," she said, though her voice cracked. "I'm fine."
"Let's be sure," Ruth replied. The timbre of her words had changed; cooler, firmer, the cadence of someone who gives instructions for a living.
Behind them the neighborhood softened, outlines melting like chalk in rain. Shingled roofs sloughed into blank planes. The scent of wet cedar thinned and a sharp antiseptic bite cut the air. Amara's stomach clenched.
"What is this?" she whispered.
Ruth...no, not Ruth, closed the remaining distance. The cardigan was gone. A crisp white uniform caught the flicker of a fluorescent lamp that hadn't been there a heartbeat ago. The mailbox had vanished with the rest of the street; in its place a narrow counter gleamed under hospital light.
"Amara," the nurse said gently, holding out a small paper cup, the kind that sweats faintly against the fingers. Two pills lay inside, bright as chalk. "Morning dose."
Amara's breath stalled. She shook her head, stepping back, and found no pavement, only slick tile beneath her heel. The air cooled to a sterile chill that raised gooseflesh on her arms.
"I'm not.... this isn't...." Her own voice wavered like a weak signal.
"It's all right," the nurse coaxed, the calm of endless repetition. "You know this part. Take them and we can start the day."
Her heart raced to match the hum, each beat a hammer. "No. I was just… walking the dog. I was..." Her gaze darted everywhere, frantic for something real.
Where was Milo?
The leash hung slack from her fist, empty.
A thin, keening sound threaded the air. Only after a breathless moment did she recognize it as her own.
Then....
A bark, sudden and sharp, cracked through the sterile quiet like a gunshot.
The world convulsed.
Color flooded back in a rush so bright it hurt. The fluorescent glare collapsed into watery daylight. Antiseptic retreated to the smell of rain and leaf mold. The white walls dissolved into dripping oaks and patched asphalt.
Milo stood at her knee, hackles raised, leash taut, chest heaving.
Ruth was exactly where she had been at the start, gray cardigan damp at the cuffs, letters tucked under one arm, brows drawn in mild concern. Only the fading echo of the hum told Amara anything had changed.
"Amara?" Ruth asked softly, as though the single word might anchor them both. "You looked… faint. Are you sure you're all right?"
Amara forced a breath into her lungs. The air tasted faintly of disinfectant, unreal and too clean. She nodded once, the motion jerky. "Yeah," she said, her voice almost a rasp. "Just… a moment."
Ruth studied her, as she drew closer, eyes searching, but offered only a small, deliberate nod, the kind you give someone balancing on a thin ledge.
Milo pressed against her shin, a warm, living weight. Amara tightened her grip on the leash until her knuckles ached, the pressure the only proof that the sidewalk, the rain, the morning, were still hers.
They stood like that for a heartbeat too long, until the normal sounds of the street returned: the distant clatter of a garbage can lid, a car door thudding shut, the wet hiss of tires on asphalt. Ordinary noises, but to Amara they rang strange and far away, as if filtered through another life.
She forced a thin smile, an apology she couldn't voice. Her legs felt rubbery, her pulse still racing, yet the world looked stubbornly unchanged, white siding, dripping trees, a day no different from the one before.
Perhaps, she told herself, it was nothing more than a fragment of old memory, a ghost of some hospital stay she could barely recall. Years ago she had been ill, hadn't she? There had been rooms like that, walls like that, a smell that clung to skin and hair.
But when she tried to pin the memory to a date, to a single season or even a year, the thought slid away like water over glass. She could not say when it had happened. She could not say if it had happened at all.
And that, more than the flicker itself, was what sent the deeper chill through her: the quiet knowledge that reality could tilt and she might never know precisely when it started.