Ticker

The problem with playing with time is that it stops affecting you, at least in the traditional sense. Every time I rewound time to fix a little mistake I kept going. Stop myself from spilling coffee on my shirt, I get a few second older. Take surface streets instead of the freeway to avoid the accident that made me an hour late for work, age an hour. Going forward was worse. I aged at the same rate I was moving forward, and going back didn’t undo the change. Of course I didn’t find out about this until I tried to see the distant future.

My hair had already gone gray, my sea-blue eyes getting cloudy. No one would ever suspect I was really only twenty-six. Or was it twenty-seven...my memory isn’t what it used to be. At any rate I definitely didn’t look my age. The biggest revelation of all was finding out that I had a bad heart. I managed to talk my way into an emergency room after my heart attack. It was interesting, trying to explain my lack of identification. I couldn’t exactly show them my driver’s license.

The prognosis said that the damage was too severe. I think I heard the phrase “borrowed time”. I remember thinking that it wasn’t borrowed. I had taken a loan and it was time to repay it. So I decided to go back, stop myself from finding the watch. It was the only option I could see.

I went back to the street where I had found it, sat down on the curb, and started winding it backward. The cold, sinking nausea came flooding back into my body. I was familiar with the feeling by now, not that it got any easier to deal with. I could see cars driving in reverse, houses being unpainted, small children getting smaller. It had only been a year since I found it, at least according to the newspapers that were being flung from a truck each morning. Relatively speaking it felt like minutes.

I could feel the strain getting worse. The pain my chest was almost unbearable, but I had to go back. If I could just go back I could stop myself from finding the damn thing, from using it, maybe I could change things. It took the last of my willpower to click the crown back to the neutral position, the creeping discomfort gradually falling away. I looked around, the morning sun feeling unbearably hot on my face.

That’s when I felt a searing jolt of pain up my arm. The world turned sideways and I felt pavement pressing into my cheek, a warm sensation spreading over my face. I could hear the watch bouncing across the street, rolling into the gutter. As my failing vision faded to darkness I could hear voices. Something about an old man. Get help. Are you okay?

I tried to lift a hand, to call out to the man across the street. All I could see was a confused look in his sea-blue eyes, his hand wrapped around something he had found in the gutter. Maybe he could pull it off. After all, they say the third time is the charm.