prompt word: mellifluous, title: all apologies in misc. flash fiction

He’d been a rock star once. Not just a “famous musician” or a “celebrity” but an actual rock star. He’d played loud, he’d been young and brash and stood for things or, anyway, at least had tried to stand for things. He was pretty proud of the person he had been back then, a young kid rising up from riding around in a van with his friends to the top of the charts, bucking all conventions, reinventing the form for a new generation. He wasn’t any of these things anymore, of course.

Oh, he was still famous. He was still playing music, if you’d call it that, singing out softened versions of his youthful wails with an acoustic guitar in his hands. The band had broken up over a decade ago, though, so now he was backed by the mellifluous tones of a tasteful string section. Two divorces later, he was still rich but not rich enough to support the dozens of lawyers, agents, children, body-guards and hangers-on he’d accumulated, so there he was, doing yet another Las Vegas residency, in his middle fifties, with that goddamn grandpa orchestra behind him.

The women still cried out his name, in the amphitheater attached to the casino, every Thursday night, Friday night, twice on Saturdays and Sundays, but now they’d flown in from Dallas or Los Angeles for an all-girls wine weekend because they’d found a three-day sitter for the kids and the husbands were probably off golfing or whoring around Reno or both. This was his life now.

Every day he woke up around one in the afternoon, in a lush penthouse at the top of the hotel, surrounded by bottles of blood pressure medicine and erectile dysfunction remedies instead of cool drugs and he remembered his favorite David Bowie quote. He’d known Bowie a little, they had partied together a few times, their assistants sent Christmas cards to each other for them, oh God those were the days, weren’t they? He woke up one in the P.M. and remembered this quote:

“Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them.” He thought about it often.

Until one late Sunday night, in his penthouse bed with yet another forty-something housewife he’d pulled out of the crowd, this one with a particular twinkle in her eye said, “your music has brought me such joy, you know, if I could give you one wish in return, what would it be?” He laughed. “I wish I could start over.”

And so, he awoke twenty-seven-years-old again, young and pretty again, still playing loud, like he wished he always could, in his old Seattle house. Kurt thought about what the next twenty-seven years of his life were going to look like and he thought about that Bowie quote again.

He looked over at the gun he kept around the house in case a stalker tried breaking in and he thought about all of it. Mister Cobain thought about it all for a good long time.