Restructured

Security frowns at the backpack, so she makes a joke, says it’s her date. Straight-faced, they wand metal detectors through files and spreadsheets her boss asked her to look over, in case she has time to get ahead. The words of someone who’s spent his life ahead.

The band she’s come to see was popular three decades ago. Back when she imagined herself becoming a boss in silky blouses unbuttoned at the top and curling around her neck, looking like favorite TV characters. Now, in her thrift store blouse she follows a crowd up the steps to the balcony, hoping for seats to unburden tired feet. She finds two and texts her husband so he can find her.

During the lull between opening act and headliner her husband naps. She goes to the bathroom but avoids the mirror. Few women at this show stop to apply lipstick or fluff skinny hair. Those things matter less after 8 pm, after fifty. Back in her seat, she puts on her glasses and answers email from her boss, who has a lot of questions. He’s newly hatched in a job title that sounds like the one she had before the restructuring.

The headliners take the stage. She keeps her glasses on. The two women play guitar, wail, and roar about the indignities of menopausal bodies where they once roared about the indignities of having young bodies under the watchful eyes of men and capitalism. She wails with them. The air around her heats up. Molecules rearrange themselves, become electric, hysteric. She touches the future boss she once was, messy and insistent on taking up space. She returns home in a bubble of nostalgia and empowerment. She dreams of shrieking and kicking, bunion and all, boardrooms and stakeholders, deliverables and assets, and ripping up spreadsheets to watch them float like stage fog under strobe lights.