Ring. 

Ring.

Ring.

Yebin repeatedly presses the doorbell, anxiously awaiting Minkyung to answer. 

Finally, the noise of the latch clicks on the other side of the door, and it swings open to reveal Minkyung. 

She looks horrible. Yes, Yebin loves her best friend more than anything in the world, but Minkyung looks horrible. 

Hair a tangled mess, skin pale like she’s been hugged by a ghost, eyes bloodshot from tears, mucus slightly coming out of her sniffling nose.

“Oh my god, Minkyung.” Yebin says. “I’m so sorry.” 

She looks down, and notices a film camera in her best friend’s hand. She doesn’t ask questions, but she wonders.

Minkyung falls forward, head landing on Yebin’s shoulders and arms wrapping around her waist. 

They stand there, for a few blissful moments, out there on the front porch, an afternoon breeze drifting both of their hair to the left as Minkyung sobs and sobs into Yebin’s shoulder. 

“Minky... do you remember?” she says, rubbing circles into the taller girls back. “Do you remember anything?”

“What?” Minkyung murmurs through cries. 

Perhaps this isn’t the right time.

“Never mind. Hey, let's go inside."

She leads the girl back in to the house, closing the door and sitting her down on the couch. 

"Um... Do you want me to make you something? You really should eat." 

Minkyung doesn’t say anything. Her tears seem to have stopped, and now she stares blankly ahead, rocking back and forth with her fingers balled into the fabric of the couch. 

"I'm sorry, I'm so bad at this." Yebin says, her brain thinking back to the last time this happened. The time she can remember—standing in Minkyung's kitchen while Minkyung cried and sobbed and weeped until there were no tears left, and then they had eaten cereal together in silence. 

"Can you... make those cookies you make sometimes? With the M&Ms in them?" Minkyung says quietly, wrapping her arms around her folded legs.

"O-of course!" Yebin gasps. "I'll get right on it." 

Minkyung gives her a smile.

"There's M&M's in the pantry above the sink."

"Thank you." 

It doesn't feel right may leaving Minkyung there, but she does it anyway.

In the quiet kitchen, Yebin thinks. How is she back here? Did she travel or did she imagine everything? The ghosts and the red skies and the lightning? 

She swings open the fridge and takes out two sticks of butter. 

There's something about all the food in the fridge, that Tabasco sauce Minkyung's father used to love, Minkyung's mother's diet cherry-flavored yogurt, that brings Yebin immense sadness. It's too strange to see this all again. 

Or even the fact that Minkyung is living in a house, that her grades are pinned to the fridge, that there's all these signs of life in a house now empty with a swinging "For Sale" sign in the yard. Well—not now. But what is now?

She pulls out the eggs too, the flour, the sugar, the baking soda, the bowl. 

Perhaps this is a vivid dream, like one of her strange dimensional trips. 

But it doesn't seem like it. Everything feels so... Well, not normal, but like life before everything happened. 

Even the accident was just a piece of her and Yebin's history. A horrible piece, but still just something to mark on the timberline of their lives. Now she's not even sure what reality really is anymore. 

Dry ingredients first.

Then turn on the mixer.

It whirrs, filling up the quiet of the house. 

Now Yebin wants to cry, too. 

Not even for Minkyung's parents, because well—their death is something she's already lived through. Now she's crying for Minkyung, because there has to be a terrible pain in living through this again.

Cookie sheet.

Grease the pan.

Breathe. 

Tears come a little faster, and Yebin can't quite see through the watery shield they put over her eyes, so when she reaches for a spatula, her hand knocks hard into the side of one of the cabinets, and she suddenly realizes she's started bleeding.

Hurriedly, she dashes to the nearest bathroom, grabbing toilet paper off the ring to wipe her eyes. She's about to open the medicine cabinet, when she notices something odd. A red handprint on the mirror, but not on the physical surface of it, rather, it's like somehow, someone was trapped inside the glass and had been pressing against it, trying to get out. 

She opens the medical cabinet, getting that familiar tingle down her spine as she reaches for a band-aid. 

At the edge of the sink, she sees something lying there. 

A tube of cherry chapstick. 

She picks it up, and walks slowly to her living room. 

"I think you need this right now." She says, giving her best attempt at a smile as she holds it out to Minkyung.

“Are my lips chapped?” Minkyung looks up at her, confused. 

Yebin suddenly remembers—the chapstick habit had come around post-accident. 

“I don’t know, just sometimes, having something to do when you’re angry at the world is nice.” She wraps the band-aid around her hand. “Cherry’s your favorite flavor, right?”

"It is. Thanks, weirdo." Minkyung cracks a smile, a more genuine one this time, and uncaps the chapstick. "And thanks for... being here. It means a lot to me." 

Head swirling with deja-vu, Yebin smiles back.

"Anything for you."

Groundhog day. That's what this is—some sort of quirky movie plot she's living in.

She goes to her job, and remembers she's only been working there for a couple of months at this point in time. Siyeon doesn't even work here yet. It's just her and Nayoung, awkwardly standing there, Yebin thinking about every strange thing and conversation she's had with Nayoung since everything started. 

One day, while restocking the peanuts in the bulk foods aisle, she thinks about Jieqiong's notes from the library, the way that Nayoung and her had talked.

The way they had discussed it like they'd lived through it all before. 

Then it hits her. What if—what if Nayoung can remember it too? 

Yebin bites her tongue, but she casts away the thought like it's a balled up scrap of paper. 

She starts to get into the rhythm of things. Sure, she can't sleep out of the fear that she'll wake up and have to start again, but there's something nice about having a fresh start, a chance to throw away all the mistakes. 

But the memories haunt her. And the dreams—the dreams remind her. Terrifying red-eye figures, Minkyung screaming for help, the bridge snapping in half, lightning bursting through the sky. 

Yebin wants to curl up into a ball. There's no one to talk about this with, it's forever just her, alone and afraid, quite possibly going entirely insane. 

Would Minkyung understand? 

Perhaps not.

But Yebin still finds herself stumbling across the street at 3am anyway. 

Surprisingly, Minkyung is awake. 

She answers the door with a blanket hung on her shoulders, TV flickering in the background of her darkened living room.

"What are you doing here, dummy?"

"I don't know. What are you doing awake?" 

"Funeral plans."

"Oh." Yebin looks at the table in front of the couch, seeing scattered invitations, paperwork, and photographs littered everywhere.

"Here, come in. What's the matter?"

"Why are you trying to comfort me? I should comfort you."

"I'm fine. It's sort of... so terrible that I don't feel anything at all. Did you know they're taking this house away from me because I can't pay rent with my idiotic convience store job?"

Yes, Yebin thinks, because it's already happened.

"No! They can't do that to you!" she says instead, as the two sit down on the couch.

The digital clock on top of the TV beeps. 

"Listen, Yeb, let me know what you're going through. I'd much rather deal with someone else's problems than my own."

Yebin swallows her nerves. 

"You're not going to believe me."

Minkyung her head and chuckles. 

"You're my best friend. I'll believe anything you say."

Yebin leans back against the couch and pulls a pillow to her chest, sighing.

"Have you ever thought that you're going insane?" 

Minkyung reaches for the TV remote and turns down the volume.

"A couple times, recently, yeah."

"I think that's happening to me. It's either that or something is very, very wrong with this town."

"There's always something wrong with this town."

"No, not that, Minky. I think I... I time traveled."

"What?" 

"When I woke up the day your parents died, it wasn't like waking up from the day before. It was like—how do I put this—like I had lived an entire two years already and I had been sent back to the start.”

“Like a dream?”

“No. Dreams can feel real when you’re in them, but when you wake up, you realize they're fake, y'know? This one, it was like I had just been there, living my life, and then I was sent back. I'd already been through everything, Minky. Your parents death, the funeral, graduation, everything."

Minkyung stars at her, wide eyed. 

"What was it all like?" 

"Well, um, in that reality, we were ghost hunting, and we found something... strange. We were being hunted by these weird creatures with red eyes, and experiencing visions and all sorts of scary stuff. That's partially why I feel like I'm going nuts. It's all so vivid in my head, and yet, or shouldn't be real."

"Yeb..." Minkyung reaches forward and takes Yebin's hand. "I believe you. Because when I woke up that afternoon, of that day my parents had died, I experienced this really strange thing in the bathroom, and I—"

Before she can finish, Yebin whips her head around because she hears a noise. A long, ugly scratch. Panic incites in her bones, hairs on her neck standing up. 

"Yebin, what's going o—AH!" 

They're both falling, landing with a thump on the floor, hands still clenched together. 

At first Yebin doesn't understand how they managed to fall from their comfortable position on the couch, but when she looks up—she understands. 

The couch is on the ceiling. So is the TV, the table, every piece of Minkyung's living room remains precariously stuck to the floor, dangling above threateningly. Yebin looks next to her to see the ceiling lamp, flickering red. 

"Yebin?" Minkyung asks, nervously tightening her hand in her friends. 

Slowly, Yebin stands up, knees chattering and ankles shaking. 

"OK, I'm not the only one seeing the whole room is upside down right?" she asks Minkyung.

"Nope. I am definitley seeing that too." Minkyung says, following suit by also standing. Everything above them seems perfectly in place—like only they were affected by a new sense of gravity. 

Still holding hands, they begin to move in the direction of the next room. At the doorframe, Yebin pauses to let go of Minkyung for a second. 

"I'm gonna see if it's safe." she says, lifting herself over the top of the doorframe, feet landing with a thud on the kitchen ceiling. 

Still the same. 

"Can I come through?" Minkyung asks. Yebin nods, holding out her hands. 

There's an odd calmness in this entire experience—an unexplainable synchronicity in it all, the way the two interact with each other. They've always been able to communicate with each other on a level far beyond just talking, and right now, Yebin can feel it. The connection between her and Minkyung. 

“I feel strangely relaxed right now.” Minkyung says, looking up at her kitchen floor—all the dishes stacked around, somehow perfectly the same even as they hang above, everything just as it had been left—just upside down. 

Yebin gives Minkyung her best hopeful grin. 

“If you think about this, it’s kind of cool.”

She takes a step forward, and feels confused when her foot doesn’t hit the ground. Behind her, she feels her back foot is no longer pressed against the ceiling, and when she turns to Minkyung, she notices the girl is floating a few centimeters in the air. 

"Minkyung?” she asks, looking around them. From the ceiling things start to move too, kitchen mixers and plates and bags of flour, all gently floating into the air. 

The two look around, stunned, as every loose piece of the kitchen begins to move and float, caught in a soft swirling rhythm. 

Around the pair, hands still clasped, floats mugs and dishes and silverware, in a sort of paradoxical harmonized cacophony. Yebin feels like she’s swimming without having to worry about air—it’s odd, it’s peaceful, it’s disturbing. 

She’s low enough now, somewhere in the middle between the floor and the ceiling, that she can see into the living room, and she notices everything there is floating too when she sees the mirror on the far wall.

She looks into the glass, squinting from far away seeing her and Minkyung’s silhouettes in front of the window, but wait, is that someone outside—

A loud scratch interrupts her thoughts and whatever peace was once there, and Yebin sees for a flash a red figure watching behind them from the window in the reflection of the mirror, but when she turns, theres a bang so loud her ears ring for a while after. 

Then they fall, hard against the ground, along with everything else, dodging as ceramic plates and wine glasses smash hard against the kitchen tile, their entire world reversed once again. 

All that’s left is a shocking silence and the ringing in Yebin’s ears. 

Minkyung looks up at her. 

“I remember...” she pauses. “I remember something.”