Time, it’s the one thing everyone is racing against, the one finite thing everyone needs but can’t get. We race against time by eating right to gain time or take shortcuts to save time.

We fight for time by enjoying every moment we have with the people we care for, but we can't really get more time, we can't beg, borrow or steal time.

So sometimes we cheat for time. Multitasking, trying to do two things, or more, at once is essentially cheating time, and time, being unstoppable and even handed, hates a cheater.

In this case, the person I saw in what I believed to be my final moments of my time, was trying to multitask eating a hamburger and answering a phone call. I know this because I myself was trying to cheat time, on my way home from a long hard day of work, I was speeding and checking traffic conditions, had I not been doing one or the other, I could have avoided the woman in the large sports utility vehicle who drifted into my lane going the opposite direction. Instead, I got to see the look of panicked in the woman’s eyes, I tried to jerk the steering wheel, but it was far too late, it only angled my car so the SUV would hit my door directly instead of the front of my car. Everything slowed down, my heart thumped as my body deployed ever drop of survival mechanisms to save me from death. The cocktail of hormones pumped into my body and brain did nothing to help me avoid the thousands of pounds of vehicle approaching, but did let me have a slow-motion perspective as the gleaming Cadillac emblem approached my face at eye level. I like to think I didn’t scream, but I don’t know what my body was doing and there was no sound. I got to watch the impact crumple my door and cracks craze the safety glass of my side window. Then, blackness took me. I remember a light, voices, and floating through a familiar void.

Then I awoke here, at the crossroads of my village, the center of life in rural Doverland, the village healer stood over me with steam rising from her shoulders as if she had run miles on a cold morning. I looked to my right, my mother and father knelt next to me, tears in my mother’s eyes, relief on my father’s stoic features.

I heard myself speak before I realized I was, “Mom, is the other driver OK? Did they get out?”

My mom wiped a tear from her eye, she just leaned down and hugged me around my chest, “what matters now is you’re well, Matias. Well and whole, and back with us.”

After a few moments of her crying with relief, my mother helped me to sit up and I looked around, expecting paramedics, police, and a scene of automotive destruction. There was no broken glass or sirens, no traffic or other motorists. Instead, a pool of blood was under me and the O’Doul brothers from the next farm were splitting their efforts between attacking a balding portly wagon driver and fighting each other. My vision swam, I put a hand to my head, it came away with blood but as I felt my face and there were no injuries. I tested pressing on parts of my head but no pain flared up so nothing was broken. “Where’s she?” I mumbled while looking for the other driver.

My father’s deep voice rumbled with a chuckle, “Madeline is right here,” he gestured to the healer standing over me to my left, “but there’s other ways to get her attention than get your head knocked in by a horse and wagon.”

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Madeline, the village healer, a short full figure woman with light brown eyes and blond hair bent down, and placed a warm hand on my head. She must have been doing something because her touch sent chills through my whole body and made me shudder. “Some confusion is normal after an injury like that, the magic has healed him, but he will need a full meal and a good night’s rest before he feels himself again.” She said with a matter of fact tone that mother’s and older sisters always use for anyone in their care.

“What happened? How did I get to the village? Last think I remember we were a way off still.” I said, not sure how I got to the village crossroads.

One of the O’Doul brothers had wandered over, James, the family’s middle son. Almost indistinguishable from the rest of the men in his family, he was tall and lean, with dark brown hair and green eyes, he wasn’t thin, or bulky, but somewhere in the middle, strength built from herding and guarding sheep his whole life. “What happened? Mattie, boy, you got your brains cracked open by this merchant racing through town! Wait till we get the mayor, we thought we would have to string him up! Fortune that it happened here, right at the door to Madeline's shop, she was about a step from ye before you hit the gro-”

“Back off the boy!” my father said, cutting off James when he saw he was about to go off on a tangent, “let’s get him up and home before night fall.”

Mom and dad helped me to my feet, I checked the pockets of my homespun pants with the feeling I was missing something. Everyone was talking around me, I heard snippets of conversation, but didn’t retain anything. I knew there were three important things I was missing, but didn’t remember leaving home with anything in my pockets this morning. Dad always carries the coin, and our house has no key. Maybe something fell out of my pocket after the crash, I started glancing around the area, but mom and dad steered me back down the road towards our farm. When we get home mom brought out the wash basin and dad drew water from our well so I could scrub blood and dirt off myself. Going through my hair I found a few things that feel like ceramic chips and little flecks of something soft and gray I can’t identify. Or hope I can’t. Maybe the merchant hit me with a vase or ceramic jar holding some kind of strange meat? I can’t tell, but exhausted from the day’s events I stagger to my room and fall into my bed. Just before I fall asleep I reach over to my nightstand to plug in my phone.

I can’t reach it, but that’s fine, mom or dad must have it, they will be sure not to let it die.

I finally start to drift off to sleep, then just, as my coconsciousness fades, as I start to stop feeling my body, my mind jolts awake with shock and horror. I’m in my bedroom, in my family’s house, I live here with my two brothers and parents, it’s on our family farm and mill, near the village of Eagleton, county of Doverland, in the realm of The Great Tree. My name is Matiaus, I am 18 years of age and tomorrow is the equinox and system day for our county.

However, this is not my room, I should be home in my bed, in Wall, Texas, USA. I live there with my wife and our cats, and sometimes our adult daughter. I support my family with veterans' disability and work as an analyst at a box factory. My name is Donald Kline, I’m 46, and the last thing I can recall from that life is a Cadillac emblem headed directly for my face.

I remember two whole lives. One, growing up on a rural farm with my two younger brothers and parents. We kept a pair of cows, a few chickens, a small garden, some pastureland for the cows, and a water mill that we run for our neighbors in trade, usually for part of a crop, it was a quiet life, difficult at times, but still full of closeness and we hardly went hungry even in long winters. The second set of memories is far, far removed and much longer.