Credit: Jamie Tufrey

Faded orange signs led Zane Tsien to a crippled old house. He pulled into the driveway. Before Emily, he never would have put his life on hold to find a garage sale, but in 22 years of marriage, she'd converted him to her musty religion.

Now that Emily rested beneath the cemetery stones these past nine years, awaiting perhaps some cosmic force to rescue her as she'd rescued so many forgotten treasures, Zane carried on the tradition. Secretly, he called it phantom wife syndrome, because he knew she'd have found it amusing.

Zane closed the door on his elderly car and surveyed the battlefield. Garage sales tended to break down into three basic types, from best to worst: people moving away, people doing a random or spring cleaning, and those who made a business of it, running garage sales continuously.

At first glance, this one fell into the second category. The ancient biddy in the torn recliner had decided her son's old college books and grandpa's weight set could finally go, along with those dresses her daughter never came back for sometime during the '80s.

Zane smiled like a predator and headed for the cardboard box of books beneath a sky that threatened to drench them into oblivion. He gave the old woman a friendly nod. She returned it with a tired smile.

Most people collected books he'd have been embarrassed to display to the world. Romance novels that were anything but romantic, true crime books about the worst of humanity's evils and, always, a cookbook with recipes for the modern woman of 1955.

He sorted through the usual junk, piling the weeds upon the folding plastic table. When he finally reached something interesting, he lifted it as one might a child or relic of ancient Greece.

The ink, the artwork style and the lettering all betrayed its 1970s origin. The cover featured a broken hourglass and the curious title Chronocide by Travis M. Teel.

Zane suddenly felt absolutely sure he'd seen this book before, somewhere. As a heavy oak leaf landed on the table, he felt strangely aware that he'd seen that happen before, too. He shook off the déjà vu.

The chances of having seen this particular book somewhere else were vanishingly small. It had all the hallmarks of a vanity press: yellowing pages, weak binding and a typeface only the author could love because finally his creation was real. Yet the sensation of familiarity persisted. As Zane cracked open the book, he felt certain it wasn't the first time.
He flipped past the table of contents, began reading chapter one.

If you feel as if you've been here before, reading these exact words at this exact moment in time, skip to chapter two.

Zane jerked his head up and looked over at the old woman. She wasn't watching him, but the cat was. The tortoiseshell stared as if expecting something, which only served to stir a growing sense of paranoia.

He'd had déjà vu before, and each time he'd tried to tell himself it was nothing more than a quirk of memory, despite the overwhelming feeling that it was nothing of the sort. Indeed, he'd experienced it so often that he'd consulted his physician about it.

Merely a sort of game played on the mind, he'd been told, by a tug of war between short- and long-term memory. At the time he'd believed it, but that faith had just taken a serious blow. He flipped to chapter two.

More likely than not, those who are drawn to time travel are already time travellers without being aware of it. If you skipped here from chapter one, then there is no question about it. You have travelled back in time, and you will do so again.