6:47 AM
Never approach a river covered with fog.
The wax cylinder in the historical society archives had her grandmother's voice on it, recorded in 1892. "Never approach a river covered with fog. Something waits inside, sweetheart. Something that listens."
The problem was that Glenda Clairmont wasn't born until 1932. But Keely knew that voice, especially the way she whistled on every S sound. Grammy got her dentures in 1978 after the car accident that knocked out her teeth, and she had to relearn how to talk without spitting on everyone. Spent six months saying "Sally sells seashells" to the bathroom mirror.
Ninety cars. That's what Channel 7 said at noon. By the evening broadcast it was thirty-seven. The highway patrol's website showed different numbers every time Keely refreshed the page: 90, 37, 12, 158, 3. Like nobody could agree on what they'd counted, or maybe counting itself had become unreliable. She survived because she was standing outside her Honda watching herself die inside it, skull hitting the driver's side window in a wet crack she could hear from thirty feet away. The dash-cam footage proved both things true. There she was, trapped. There she was, walking away before the semi even lost control.
The neurologist had explained it as temporal lobe epilepsy brought on by trauma. "The brain," he'd said, tapping his pen against her file, "sometimes splits our experiences as a protective mechanism." But he couldn't explain why her medical records showed she'd been treated for the same condition in 1943. Or why the signature on those papers was hers. "Clerical error," he muttered.
She picked the Blackfoot River to camp because she needed to think without some therapist asking how that made her feel, writing notes about "survivor's guilt" and "dissociative episodes." What she got instead was fog that moved backward against the wind and her dead grandmother talking to her from inside the water, which turned out to be worse than therapy.
On the first night, she was trying to heat beans on the portable camp stove when she heard it. Grammy, as clear as anything: "You're early, sweetheart. Thursday's not 'til tomorrow."
The spoon fell from her hand. Hit the ground without a sound. She looked down and realized there was no ground anymore, just fog pretending to be solid, holding her up out of habit or courtesy.
The fog had fingers. Not metaphorically. She could see them pressing against the gridded tent mesh, leaving wet prints that had too many knuckles, joints bending in directions that made her stomach lurch. One finger pushed through the mesh without tearing it and touched the sleeping bag, leaving a shape like her birthmark, the one on her shoulder that her mother said looked like a river. The mark was moving. Flowing. Heading downhill across the orange and green nylon.
Her phone was already recording when she picked it up. Three hours of footage she hadn't taken, battery still at 100%. She watched herself on the screen walking into the river, not like someone committing suicide but like someone going home. The water didn't splash. It opened for her and sealed over her head neat as a tidy gift wrap. The timestamp said Thursday, December 17th, 6:47 AM. Today was Wednesday. Her phone's clock said 6:46 PM.
Her hands shook. Had been shaking since the crash, she thought. No wait—she remembered now—been shaking her whole life. That’s right. Her mother's hands shook too, which made her resignation from the surgical program inevitable. And Grammys shook, which made her quilting stitches look like ECG readouts. She just now noticed it had always been there, this family tremor she'd thought was normal, the way every family has its inherited burdens. Weak hearts. Early cancers. Hands that know things before the brain does.
***
She really had to pee but was afraid to leave the tent. The fog might get in while she was gone. Or she might already be gone and not know it. The boundaries had gotten negotiable since the crash.
Finally, she couldn't wait. She dashed out and squatted behind a pine tree, watching her urine disappear before it hit the ground, absorbed by fog that was hungrier than it should be. The stream went up briefly, defying gravity, forming letters she couldn't read before remembering how to fall.
Back in the tent, the recorder picked up voices when she aimed it at the water. Not old voices like you'd expect from ghosts. Current ones. Present tense. A kid drowning right now in 1967, voice bubbling through water: "Mama, the door won't open. Why won't the door open?"
A man from 1983, calm as a weather report: "The road is still there but it goes down instead of forward now."
Grammy again, but younger, maybe twenty: "Thursday's when it happens. 6:47 in the morning. Except it already happened. You were there, Keely. In my belly when I stood in the road. You kicked when the first car hit the ice. You always knew the pattern."
Keely played the recording backward. It was her own voice giving detailed instructions about ice formation and traffic patterns, wind speeds and brake coefficients. She'd never studied any of this, she had barely passed high school physics. But her voice rattled off equations, drew verbal diagrams of exactly how metal would bend, where glass would scatter, the precise angle of impact needed to create a chain reaction that would fold ninety cars into a space the size of a living room.
Her journal had tomorrow's entry already written in her handwriting, but the ink was older than the notebook. Looked older than the paper it was on:
Emmett arrives at 6:47. Dad's watch on his wrist, the crack across the crystal catching light from angles that don't make sense. But Dad called this morning from Seattle, and asked about my "vacation." Also, Dad drowned when I was three, his body was never found, just his watch on the shore. I can't remember which is true, so all of them are, I guess. The fog makes everything true until Thursday collapses it into one story.
She checked her phone. Seven missed calls from Dad. Three from a number she didn't recognize that her phone labeled "Dad (deceased)."
A text from herself sent tomorrow at 6:47 AM: "Don't answer. They all say the same thing anyway."
She played the voicemails. All the fathers, speaking in unison through different phones: "The river remembers everything, sweetheart. Even the things that never happened. Especially those."
***
Emmett didn't walk into camp. He occurred there at 6:47 AM, as sudden as a shift in the weather. One moment she was alone, the next he sat on the log across from her, already mid-sentence.
"—wanted you to have this." The watch on his wrist caught light from somewhere that wasn't the overcast sky. That crack across its face looked like the river's path on a map.
"Which father?" she asked, surprised that she knew to ask this.
That stopped him. His face did something that wasn't quite a smile. His mouth was a window. She could see through his filmy teeth to the river behind him, through his tongue to the fog, his throat opening onto somewhere that had different weather, maybe a different year.
"You've been watching yourself die," he said. Not a question. His breath smelled like car exhaust and river water and the particular metal taste of blood in winter air.
She had. Every night. Frame by frame. Frame 2,847 was her favorite. That's where she stood in the fog holding a sign. Except the sign kept changing. STOP WATCHING. KEEP WATCHING. And now: IT'S 6:47 AM FOREVER.
"The crash," she started, but her mouth filled with fog. It condensed on her tongue, tasted wet and milky, like an ice cream shake that’s been sitting in the sun.
"Is happening. Happened. Will happen." He pulled out a notebook, its pages rustling with sounds that weren't paper. Her handwriting covered every page. But also Grammy's handwriting. Also the handwriting of someone not born yet. All the same words, same ink, layered in ways that hurt to look at directly. "You wrote this next week. Your grandmother wrote it in 1943. Your daughter will write it in 2045. Same notebook. Time's just a filing system here, and the fog doesn't file things in order."
The pages showed diagrams. Spirals drawn over and over, each one more precise. Mathematical notations about impact angles. But underneath the math, something else. The same time repeated: 6:47 AM. 6:47 AM. 6:47 AM.
"December seventeenth," he said. "Your family brings the harvest. Has always brought it. Will always bring it."
She wanted to run but her legs were already walking toward the river. Could feel water in her lungs though she was breathing air. The sensation of drowning and not-drowning at once.
"Nobody leaves until—"
"Thursday at 6:47. I know."
"No," he said gently. "You don't know. You remember. There's a difference."
He stood to leave, then turned back. "I'm not here to warn you. I'm here to remind you what you've already agreed to."
***
Tuesday night, Keely tried to ground herself in the normal. Made instant coffee on the camp stove. The familiar bitter smell, the routine of stirring, waiting for it to cool. See? Just camping. Just trauma making her mind play tricks.
She brought the cup to her lips. The coffee was already in her mouth, already swallowed, though the cup was still full. She looked at her reflection in the dark liquid. Her reflection drank first. Then she felt the hot liquid going down her throat. The cup still full, still steaming, but she could feel it in her stomach, already cold.
"Okay," she said aloud. "Not normal."
The memories were leaking now. She remembered Grammy's funeral, the way the funeral director's lazy eye kept drifting. But also Grammy never dying, could smell her coffee brewing right now in the kitchen that existed forty miles and forty years from here. She remembered causing the crash, standing in the road at exactly 6:47 AM. But also watching it on the news. But also being in all ninety cars at once, feeling her bones break in ninety different ways.
Her sleeping bag had a strange feel when she crawled into it, like someone was already inside it, breathing in time with her pulse. She frantically turned on her flashlight, but there was nothing there. But the depression in the fabric, the warmth, and the smell of her own breath coming from nowhere.
Emmett had started looking like her. Not resembling. Like her. She'd catch him wearing her exact face. When he noticed her looking he'd rearrange back to his own features, but the transition was horrible. His face would go liquid for a second, features floating before settling into a new configuration.
"The fog can't tell us apart," he explained while she watched herself sleep from outside her body. "Thinks we're all one thing experiencing itself in pieces. Like fingers thinking they're separate from the hand."
The dash-cam footage had evolved. Now it showed the crash from above, from an angle that would require a helicopter. The cars made a pattern. A Fibonacci spiral of destruction, each vehicle placed with precision. The timestamp never changed: December 17, 6:47 AM.
She tried to call her mother. Remembered her mother was dead. Remembered her mother was never born. Picked up the phone anyway.
"Hello?" Her own voice answered, but older, exhausted.
"Mom?"
"Not yet. Thursday at 6:47. Then you'll be born from the fog and I'll forget I was ever you."
Her journal was writing itself now, words appearing like condensation on glass: The shepherd guides ninety minimum. Stand at mile marker 47. Begin at 6:47 when fog is thickest.
Every time she saw: 6:47.
***
Wednesday morning the fog was inside the tent. Inside her lungs. She could taste it: iron and algae and words with too many consonants to pronounce stuck in her throat.
"I lied," Emmett said. They sat by a fire she didn't remember lighting. The flames were cold and threw shadows up into the canopy of lodgepole pines.
"About what?"
"Nothing. I've been telling you the truth since 1892." His face kept slipping. She could see Grammy underneath. Could see her future daughter. Could see herself. "You just keep forgetting what you agreed to."
He showed her the notebook again. Her handwriting describing exactly how to create the pile-up. Temperature calculations. Traffic flow equations. Where to stand measured to the centimeter. But every measurement ended with the same time: 6:47 AM.
"You won't remember doing it," Emmett said. "The fog erases that part. You'll just remember surviving."
"I won't—"
"You already did. You're doing it right now." He pointed to the road, though the road was forty miles away. She could see herself there, standing in pre-dawn dark at 6:47 AM, the flare in her hand painting her face red.
The fog around them pulsed. She could see things inside it. Faces. Hands. A child's car seat, empty but somehow still occupied with shadows. All of it circulating through the vapor.
She heard her grandmother's voice from the water: "The fog needs multiple consciousnesses dying simultaneously at 6:47. Always 6:47. The moment when night becomes morning. When sleep becomes waking. When life becomes—"
"Something else," Keely finished.
***
Thursday. 6:47 AM.
She woke standing in the river, her hands gripping fistfuls of hair. She pulled and heads rose from the water. All hers. Different ages. The eight-year-old her with missing teeth. The fifty-year-old her with gray streaks. The ninety-year-old her who would never exist except here.
"We're all here," they said in harmony. "Everyone who's stood at mile marker 47 at 6:47."
Under the water: hundreds of bodies. All breathing water like air. Some were still dying, frozen in that 6:47 moment. Others had adapted, evolved, become something between human and river.
Then she was on Highway 2. The transition seamless. 6:47 AM. The flare already lit and in her hand. Her body moving in the pattern she'd memorized without learning it.
The first car came through the fog. The driver's face, a woman, maybe thirty, checking the dashboard clock: 6:47. Their eyes met. The woman yanked the wheel. Hit the ice that formed exactly where Keely knew it would.
The spiral began.
She watched it build with detached fascination. Elegant. Precise. Each car adding to the pattern. Part of her was screaming. Part of her was counting: one, two, three... thirty-seven. The number that reality would accept.
Back at the river. Emmett nodding. The fog lifting.
"Your daughter—"
"I know."
She could feel it. Not pregnancy but inevitability. The daughter who would exist because the pattern required it. Who would stand here at 6:47 AM on December 17, 2045.
***
Keely packed her tent. The journal now said only: Bad dreams. Time to go home.
She drove back to Missoula. The clock in her car read 6:47 for the entire drive. She'd check it an hour later: still 6:47 AM.
She went to work. Told her co-workers she was fine, just fine. The scar on her forehead that sometimes bled fresh when mirrors caught it wrong. When she'd look at the blood, she'd see tiny cars in it. Microscopic pile-ups happening in every drop.
Years passed. Or happened all at once. She had a daughter, not through conception but through certainty. The girl simply existed one day, had always existed, would exist. Born with shaking hands.
December 17, 2045. 6:47 AM. The phone rang.
"Mom? I'm at the river."
"I know."
"There was an accident. My hands won't stop shaking."
Keely looked at her own hands. Still now. The tremor had passed on.
W.H. (Bill) Hilf is a science fiction writer whose debut novel, The Disruption, will arrive in early 2026. When not writing about humanity’s evolving dance with machines, he contributes his time to a variety of non-profits, from large-scale conservation to innovative AI research. He writes from Montana under appropriately big skies.