Necessary is often the mother of light fingers instead of invention. — Michael Bishop

They had both changed in eight years, eroded or subtly augmented by the sweep of time’s river.

Here he was, not quite twenty-five years old, and he was going to have to make a new life for himself. A host of options lay before him, but, tipsy with Chablis and sunshine, at the moment all he could truly feel was a powerful sense of loss and uncertainty. All the routes to his previous self—the self that had tried to survive as a loner in Fort Walton Beach—were blocked, and he did not know which new path to choose.

“Ciao,” he said again, and this time he was not talking to his mother.

Extinction confers on the has-been the same mythological status that imagination confers on the never-was.