Work Music (part one)

She had to get the documentation right. Stacks of color-coded folders to her left, printouts and spiral notebook to her right, Wanda swiveled in her office chair between them.

As the hours passed, miniscule drops in the heights of her stacks discouraged her, but Wanda savored ripping out pages from her notebook, each rip signifying another completed file. Her pile of notebook pages to shred grew taller, but Wanda ignored it. As much as she loved the tearing of completion, she hated the ragged edges of the torn paper and how they did not stack neatly.

Check, check, recheck. Wanda’s focus shifts from her papers to her computer, and back again. A few swapped letters from typing fast, and Wanda hits the delete key, not holding it down, but tapping once for every letter until she erased the mistake. Then retype, her fingers flying over the letters of her desktop keyboard, her eyes never straying from her screen. Then delete, delete, delete again. The strange music filled her office, the madcap swoosh of typing, then the staccato deleting.

This opus carried on as the light in Wanda’s office changed from vibrant sunrays to the frozen reflective light of her computer screen. The light of technology seemed to make the dark darker. It lit up Wanda’s face, bleaching her skin and emphasizing the valleys of wrinkles around her staring eyes. The natural color of those eyes was consumed by a fanatical gleam.

Wanda licked her lips. Thirsty. The music stopped as she blinked and realized her eyes were tired. She flexed her fingers, skeletal in the blue light, and reached out to touch one of her stacks. There her hand lay, resting, supported. Wanda sighed, rolled her shoulders back and tilted her head from side to side, ignoring the crackling shifts of her vertebrae. She still had work to do.