The truth of it was Milo hadn't written a lick since the divorce 18 months ago, the end of a ten-year excavation where he watched her dig back into herself to the place where there was only forgetfulness and distraction. Like watching her slip underwater, beyond his grasp, while he had been the one longing all the while to abandon ship. Watching her course through her own private synapsal pathways to some inevitable destiny, as inevitable as land crawling and tree rings and the death of dinosaurs. Natural selection. So, of course, he was helpless in its wake.

 

Too much wind kicked out of him and too much heartache to get the steam up again. And he didn't believe in writing anymore, and in a most fundamental way; everything was stolen, every thought, every phrase, every articulated epiphany, all purloined from the cemetery of literature; grave robbers, we writers, all. Dinky Prometheuses, shouting to the sky, their backyard barbecues in embers at their feet.

This was his Adam's fall. He had sadly embraced this truth, like a fundamentalist giving in to Darwin. And that now made Milo a mere montage artist, a trickster, a borrower. He just didn't feel like the whole foolish juggling act any more. It embarrassed him.

 

The rowing felt good. He leaned into the steady pump of blood coursing through the tributaries of his shoulders and neck, and the clouds in his head were beginning to dissipate. And up ahead of him, hugging the horizon, was the island, misty and moist and blooming with exotic alien flora, brimming with mystery and promise and desire.