SELF-MADE MAN
Justin had read Dandelion Wine seventeen times now, but he still hated to see it end. He always hated endings.
He turned the last page of the book and sat for several minutes in the shadows of his bedroom, cradling the old thumbed paperback by Ray Bradbury, marvelling at the world he held in his hands. The hot sprawl of the city outside was forgotten; he was still lost in the cool green Byzantium of 1928.
Within these tattered covers, dawning realization of his own mortality might turn a boy into a poet, not a dark machine of destruction. People only died after saying to each other all the things that needed to be said, and the summer never truly ended so long as those bottles gleamed down cellar, full of the distillate of memory.
For Justin, the distillate of memory was
