The crowd had loosened up by the third song, the sixty-or-so people who were scattered around the stage. Old metal-heads from the Eighties. Still wearing their black concert shirts tucked into too-tight jeans. Heads banging on rigid necks. Clinging to whatever hair they had left. Arms raised riotously in the air, fingers forked in devil horns.

Fuck yeah, I thought. The dead rise again.

Time grew elastic around the sixth song, and a calmness descended upon me like the eye of a deadly storm. Peace inside fury. My happy place. I stood in this pocket of tranquility watching sweat fly from our old fans, their faces contorted into angry sneers of post-hormonal rage.

The burn in my arm had faded several songs ago. I could play all night if needed. In fact, given how the past ten years had gone, that was exactly what I needed. Needed it more than I had known. And, for the briefest moment, I didn’t even miss the booze, or mind being at a bar. Even a shit shack like this.

We were nearing our ninth, and final, song when I first saw the chick three rows back, watching me, trying to catch my eye, swaying her hips so hypnotically it could have put a venomous snake to sleep. She smiled when she saw me looking and began to raise her shirt, a faded halter top with our old logo on the front. A fetid zombie crawling up from the earth. RISING DEAD etched across the leaning tombstone behind. Solomon sells these now for $14.99.

She raised her shirt in slow, incremental spurts, teasing me, incorporating the movement into the gyrating way that she danced. She was much younger than everyone else, still in her twenties. Which may have put her around seventeen or so when we’d split up. I wondered which of us she’d slept with. Wasn’t me, I would have remembered. That was part of what had brought the whole thing crashing down, anyway. Some one-night stands last a lifetime, I’ve learned.

Her stomach was flat and tight, with a vertical crease down the middle. Tan. She had a steel stud pierced through her navel and, as I saw when she licked her lips, another through her tongue. She swayed her hips, childbearing hips, the old man in me mumbled, and raised the shirt further to reveal the swollen underside of her breasts. Just a couple of inches more and the baby feeders would be shown.

That’s the worst part about having a kid. Tits take on new context.

Her eyelids closed as she yanked the shirt up and over her chest, the fabric snagging for a second on her nipples. I flubbed my next chord but didn’t care. We were just producing one big soundgasm at that point anyway. A cacophony of discordant noise designed to invoke chaos. To shatter the walls of what had become our structured lives.