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Sometimes Winifred Oswald caught herself yearning for something she couldn’t name. It was like a calling deep in her bones telling her she had to go, to travel, to leave and see new things, but maybe… not quite yet. Soon, perhaps. She had a boring office job and a vague sense that she could do something more interesting with her life, something far away, but somehow soon never arrived. Instead she continued to wake up from misty, forgettable dreams with unfamiliar names on her lips or strange thoughts in her head. Thoughts that would seem entirely foreign, almost alien, and that she would complain to her friends about, saying she felt like Sleeping Beauty.
It was as if she was constantly dreaming of another life that she couldn’t quite recall and wasn’t ever able to wake up enough to touch. Frankly, it was a little infuriating.
The strangeness even intruded on her waking life from time to time. Like the first time Winnie walked around the corner of her favourite high street and found an oddly American looking diner just sitting there. It was brightly coloured and looked deeply out of place in the cold, grey depths of winter. A building that she would have sworn hadn’t been there the day before, until she realised she must have gotten herself turned around somehow (and never mind that she’d lived in the area for years) because the next day she couldn’t find it again no matter where she looked.
But she shook that off like she did her dreams. Until one day when she turned the same corner like always and there the diner was again, just as big and bright and surprising as she remembered.
This time she definitely wasn’t lost. Winnie even backtracked to double check that the high street was still behind her where it was meant to be, and it was. She tried the door to the diner except it was locked and she couldn’t see anyone moving around inside. There wasn’t even any sort of sign listing the business hours or proclaiming a ‘coming soon’ announcement.
So Winnie retreated to the sidewalk. Planting herself in the best vantage point, she ignored anyone who tried awkwardly to squeeze around her as she settled in to stare.
Something wasn’t right here and she was determined to figure out what it was. Which meant that she was still staring, lost in her thoughts, when her doppelgänger rounded the corner and collided with her. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” the woman with Winnie’s face told her. And just like that, her entirely ordinary if occasionally spooky life flipped itself upside down (or possibly right side up, she never could quite decide.)
*
The woman, Clara-no-last-name, lead the way inside after introducing herself and unlocking the door. Even though they left the door open behind them, the diner stayed empty other than the two of them. The only exception was a woman out the back who briefly stuck her head through a staff door when she heard them walking around. Clara had just blown her a kiss with a cheeky wink and she’d promptly disappeared again, smiling.
It seemed a strange sort of way to run the place, but neither of them seemed terribly bothered. So Winnie just watched with a frown as Clara started pottering around behind the counter, making tea for both of them and rescuing a few sad looking little cakes from the pastry display to put on a plate. Once it was done, with both cups of tea silently fixed exactly the way Winnie preferred hers, Clara carried it all over to a booth and beckoned for Winnie to join her before sitting down with a heavy sigh.
Taking a long sip from her cup, finally she spoke again. “So, this is weird.”
“No kidding,” Winnie agreed, nudging the plate of stale cake a little further away from herself on principle. “We look exactly the same!”
“… that’s not exactly why I think it’s weird but sure, let’s go with that,” Clara said, squinting a little and tilting her head to the side.
“Why wouldn’t it be weird? I mean, statistically- and there’s probably, like, websites for this sort of thing, but still. Nobody just walks into someone who looks basically exactly the same as them. It’s like some awful storyline from a soap on the telly, except I don’t have any siblings so- Wait, do you have siblings? Maybe we were-"
“We weren’t accidentally switched at the hospital,” Clara interrupted her, stopping her nervous babbling by briefly reaching across to press a surprisingly cool hand against Winnie’s own for a moment. “Don’t ask me to explain because I can’t, not yet, but there’s something I need you to do for me. I need you to not go to the airport next April. Doesn’t have to be fancy, just stay home if you like. That would be fine. But do not, under any circumstances, go to the airport. Particularly not Heathrow. Probably best to avoid all of them anyway just to be safe, but especially avoid Heathrow.”
Winnie blinked, going still with her tea raised halfway to her mouth. “I- what?”
“Bit of a cock up, really. My fault, I’m afraid, see… I sort of turned up somewhere that I wasn’t meant to be and got myself mistaken for you. Entirely by accident, but here we are and now it’s really important that you don’t turn up there as well. I’m not precisely qualified to identify all the way things that might go wrong if you do, but I’m going to err on the side of caution and assume that it would be bad. Possibly very bad.”
Winnie rubbed her temple for a moment, trying to sort that out in her head. “Wait. I can’t go somewhere next year because you’ve already been- but that hasn’t even happened yet."
“Yes. Sorry. I know it doesn’t make any sense but I’m sort of hoping you’ll go with it and trust me just this once. After all, I’m you! Kind of.”
Clara smiled comfortingly and reached over to squeeze her hand again while Winnie gaped at her, before nudging her still hovering cup of tea a little closer to her mouth.
“Trust me. It’ll be worth your while, I promise.”
*
The dreams became more frequent after that and started getting clearer with each successive night. Once she dreamt of asking out a girl named Bill and of her wonderful smile when Winnie kissed her goodnight. The next she woke up talking about snow and remembered climbing an odd staircase. Sometimes people called her Winnie and sometimes it was Clara, or Oswin, or something she couldn't even pronounce. Many different people told her that she was going to see the stars and she almost always did, and sometimes they were terrible but they were always also beautiful.
A few times she even dreamt the same thing over and over again. It was the only dream that wasn’t unique, and it was always about a strange blonde woman who stared at her like Winnie was the most amazing impossibility she’d ever seen. The first thing out of her mouth was always, “hang on, you shouldn’t be- wait, no, never mind, not important. You’re absolutely right, averting impending doom should definitely be the priority,” and then they were running. They were always running.
And as dawn broke on a clear morning in April, Winnie terrified her housemate by waking up screaming for a doctor. Only- she was totally fine. No pain, no symptoms of anything, and no cause for alarm other than her apparently new discovery of night terrors.
It was also the first time in a long time that Winnie couldn’t remember something about her dreams. The first time since she’d met Clara, when she thought back on it.
Of course, she had woken up with her heart pounding in her chest plenty of times before but Winifred Oswald never, ever screamed. Not even when she was a kid. Besides, it was usually… well, it was a sort of thrilling kind of fear, really. Then to cap the morning off, Winnie noticed the waitress from the diner lurking outside her window as she was making breakfast - but of course she was long gone before Winnie could get outside to confront her with her questions.
Winnie might not have gotten her answers that day but the urge to travel still left her in the months that followed. She felt listless at first, like she was just sort of dragging herself around and perpetually at loose ends with nothing left worth doing with her life. Which was ridiculous because nothing in her life had actually changed. Days carried on like normal, full of work and friends until she had almost, almost, forgotten the strange girl in the diner who shared her face. Until she remembered that she liked her boring little office job actually, and that her friends were the absolute best and never told her no when she wanted to go down the pub to try again to forget it all. Why would she want to leave them?
Despite her best efforts, the memory never really faded away entirely though. So when she spotted her own face peering out from her neighbours' new garden shed, Winnie wasn’t particularly surprised. Mostly she was just relieved.
“Hello,” Clara called out to her with a wave. “Come on in here, yeah?”
Then she somehow disappeared from view entirely even though the shed was barely a metre wide in both directions and she’d left the door ajar. Winnie frowned as she walked closer, listening to Clara still chatting away inside - though her voice was getting strangely faint and sort of echoing a little, which didn’t make any sense.
“It’s probably just going to be the one trip, mind. Don’t want to attract too much attention. It’s the least I can do though, considering how much I owe you for actually listening to me about April,” Clara continued yelling as Winnie hovered by the door, feeling unusually hesitant and not entirely sure why. “I probably wouldn’t have listened if I was you, so thanks for that!”
It felt like there might be something momentous on the other side of the shed door. Something about it also felt familiar though, which was confusing because it was just a shed and a new one at that. But the woman with her face was in there and nobody else could answer Winnie’s questions so she took a deep breath and thought of her latest dream - another one she’d woken up from with a smile on her face - as she pulled the door the rest of the way open so she could look inside.