Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (And a Note)

First he thought it was a traffic ticket. James had grown lazy, after all. He had squandered a PhD in physics, lost his fiancee to a real-estate developer and had not been employed since his days in an applied sciences lab near Gallup. His shoebox apartment offered no views of the busy ski-town streets, the only evidence of tourists being the occasional bursts of laughter from the restaraunt below him.

He made his way down the stairs, through the bar and across the street where his old Nissan Sentra awaited him. He was craving an omlette from the diner.

But the note tucked beneath the windshield wiper ruined his breakfast plans. He plucked it away from the glass.

"James," the note began. "In three years I will kill you."

James looked around. Tourists grazed the sidewalks. Young locals walked with heads bent down to phone screens. A magpie alighted onto the earthy green rim of a trashbin. James saw noone of suspicion. He read the rest of the note aloud, questioning the threshold between something real and something impossible.

He drove away with the note still in hand, gripping it between thumb and forefinger at one o''clock on the steering wheel, repeating the two lines over and again in his head. In three years, I will kill you. Who could have left such a message? Had the note not been addressed to him, he would have thought it was placed on the wrong car. Had he any friends, he would have considered it a hurtful prank. Had his ex-fiancee still cared for him, he would have thought it to be a tasteless form of motivation. But instead, he thought something impossible: the handwriting was his own.

Had he written this note?

He thought back on the nights he had wandered down the stairs to the bar. Had he not been the kind of guy who was forbidden by the first-name-only bartender buddy to leave the bar after shots, he would have thought he had placed the note there himself. But he had no recollection. So, he thought the next impossible thing.

It took him six weeks of sobriety, a month of fundraising and a three hour drive south before he resumed his work in the lab. Had he still been an alcoholic, he would have thought his work there too far-fetched to be rendered meaningful. Had he still been feeling sorry for himself, he would have thought to stay in Taos. Had he not ignored the scoffs and the view up his colleagues' noses, he would have thought he was wasting his time. Instead, he thought the third impossible thing and worked hard to turn it into a reality.

That took the next two years.

During that time, James became friends with his co-workers, one of whom onced worked with his ex-fiancee. Had James still been mourning the loss of said fiancee, he would have thought to ignore his co-worker's sympathetic-bordering-on-flirty glances. But he was over 'Dr. I'm-Too-Good-For-You' and her new land-grabbing husband and that meant a date with Hi-I'm-Hillary with the flirty eyes. He had the chance during dinner to consider the practicality of a new relationship, but instead he thought another impossible thing and proposed to her over coffee and a table-mint-wrapper-ring.

Two years, eleven months and twenty-nine days after finding the note, James stepped through the air-lock door to his lab and entered his time machine. And as the vessel powered up, his heart racing, thoughts of his beloved Hillary racing like light waves through his head, he thought the of the next impossible thing, a former impossibility, and vanished.

He appears on the sunny, snow-plowed streets of Taos, where tourists graze the sidewalks and young locals walk with heads bent down to phone screens and magpies hover over trashbins. James collects himself. Smiles. Then, he writes out a note as he steps across the street to the old Nissan Sentra. And after placing the note on his old car, he decides to stroll to the diner for an omlette.