He looked at the cracked CD case on the table. The crack was still there. But now it didn't look like damage. It looked like a geological fault line, a fracture in time that connected the starving kid in the storage unit to the man sitting in the quiet dark.
Then, the FLAC.
He picked up the liner notes. Printed on matte paper, they smelled of ink and cardboard. He could finally read the tiny thank-yous, the studio credits, the inside joke he’d never been able to zoom in on before. Stone Sour Hydrograd -2017- FLAC CD