LAST FLIGHT OUT
A Journey Through Memory
Sometimes an entire novel begins with a wrong turn.
In this case, it began when I wandered into a vintage photography shop in Marin County.
Thousands of old black-and-white photographs stared back at me.
Each captured a single frozen moment.
Each hinted at a much larger story.
I found myself wondering:
What if you could step into one?
That question became Last Flight Out.
⁂
An exhausted Santa Barbara bar owner impulsively boards the last evening flight out of town.
His destination becomes Sausalito.
His real destination is somewhere out of The Twilight Zone..
A mysterious photography gallery becomes the gateway to impossible journeys.
One photograph leads him to a billiards game with Mark Twain.
Another tempts him to prevent President Kennedy’s assassination.
Others invite him to revisit moments where history—and perhaps his own life—might have unfolded differently.
People assume the novel is about time travel.
It isn’t.
It’s about second chances.
About memory. About forgiveness.
About the irresistible temptation to believe that, if only we could revisit one moment, everything thereafter would somehow improve.
The irony, of course, is that every photograph freezes only an instant.
Life is what happens just before and just after the shutter clicks.
Perhaps that’s why old photographs exert such power.
They invite us to imagine parallel lives.
The inspiration for Last Flight Out was a dusty little photography shop... and the realization that every faded photograph is really an unopened door.