The act of focusing on life had for Ever’s father more than occasionally defeated him.

The condition that age and a battering bring with them; it is known as the stoop.

A bending forward from the hips as if driving through a heavy gale, with shuffle steps. That coupled with a thickening around the middle, a general filling out of all the finer points of youth, as if the sculptor had got bored and given up the defining process, given up the chipping away to sustain angular perfection.

Then it turns, it turns through age, backwards, the artist no longer attempting the perfect ideal. There is no time left. Not sufficient time. The backwards process of age has taken the perfection away and then spends those remaining years defiling it. Life is a forward process and then a destruction. This backwards process, a reversal, an obscuring, makes youth seem like a gift that should never have been given, or at least ever cherished; an anger sets in, even though we know that nothing can challenge the process.

This was the process his father had been submitted to, the physicality of defeat.

The mystery of human frailty, this error, passes us by in our moments of trying to survive, but is unavoidable in the end.

Why is it, then, challenged by some? Ever was in a half-dream, now, revisiting the face-lifts in the Rodeo public parking. Image after image came to him. Why then do some call in the sculptor, the surgeon, to attempt to carve the stone back, back to its perfection, when they know the stone has worn. When no sharpness can now be attained, no accuracy of line; it is brittle and its smoothing produces a flatness of definition, no detail of personality.

It has lost its ability to present its original image.

The artist, the sculptor, just looks untalented, unskilled. And the model looks like a very bad piece of work, something that should have been binned in the studio.

Ever’s mind was swimming in the waves of tequila, and drowning in 10 mg of Ambien.

But they were all in the same frame. The face-lifted women and the failing, the disintegration of the artist. It was the same. Old and fighting. Just different canvases.

Is this the position that Ever’s father found himself in, then, on that day when it all seemed to go black?

The unskilled artist binning his work, the attempt to retrieve his past abilities had vanished as he stood bent with his aged stoop. The past glory in crumbled and brittle collapse. Now in this old man’s life there seemed to be no hope after what was dished out by the God, the Source of the Universe, the provider: the unfolding of events in a misconceived and overambitious life.