Force Majeure
A Flash Fiction: He kept telling himself that for a man like him, what he was doing wasn't wrong. It was only natural. Nature decided to tell him otherwise.
A warm, comforting whisper —a sigh of sorts— confirms that he had managed to slip the stylus into the groove. Life rushes into the track as it's rhythmic undulations proceeded to produce the pleasant vibrations of new strings on an old guitar. The sound follows him across the room, pressing him beneath it's waves as he flops down onto what was left of his side of the bed. The stars look down as the wind whistles along with the album through the massive hole left in the roof. The bittersweet soliloquy of a lost lover is voiced as the singer finally slides into the smooth, sultry stanzas of Mississippi Rendezvous.
Reaching over the trunk, careful to avoid the dark stain, he fumbles through the tangle of broken branches and retrieves her crumpled up pack of Virginia Slims. Still a little bit shaky, he lights up for the first time in fifteen years and looks around the room to try and locate a bowl or a beer can, or anything really, before realizing that he might as well just ash on the carpet. He'd be paying for a lot of things in the morning, but the extra cleaning fee for the AirBnB wouldn't be one of them.