The street and sidewalks of Old Town were packed with people, more spilling out beyond the orange plastic barricades. Hundreds of people. Maybe a thousand. Years past, there had barely been enough people to fill half a block. David and Sunny worked their way through the crowd to make it within sight of the stage, where the band had already begun to play. It was a bluesy country group that had moved into town to play the bars. David could never quite remember their name.
Thick smoke rich with the scent of barbecued beef wafted up from a large black grill, and a line extended back, people with plates waiting their turn. Volunteers from the church put hamburger buns on plates, scooped beef onto the buns, spooned out baked beans and slaw. Under a small tent, Vic struggled to keep pace with everyone demanding a beer.
The previous year, no one had invited any of the outsiders, or even told them about the Crane Dance. A few had happened across it and asked David after the fact. This year, the locals had offered tickets all over town. David hadn’t figured many would come, but then he’d been wrong plenty before.
It had started fifty-odd years before, when David’s grandma and some of the other women around town came up with the idea to hold an event around the cranes, which gathered here so thickly that even then they drew birdwatchers to town. They settled on a dance, a nod to the mating dance of the cranes. Never mind that the birds actually mated while they were in warmer climates far to the south. More than anything, it was an excuse to gather together and drink and dance and forget about the struggles of life. And so it kept on, a tradition that would not die.
David saw Aaliyah and her family through the crowd and led Sunny over. Behind them, David saw Imam Bey and several Muslim families that he recognized from the night of the fire. David introduced Sunny to them.
“Glad you could made it,” David said.
“Of course. Thanks for inviting us,” Aaliyah’s husband said, then turned to his wife. “Come on. When was the last time we danced?”
He pulled her by the hand toward the open area, where couples twirled arm in arm. Their son made an embarrassed look, then wandered off toward friends.
Sunny held her hand out to David.
“Come on, country boy.”
He guided her through the steps, their bodies close, torsos scraping as they circled and side-stepped through upbeat numbers, then locked together when the music slowed into melancholic tunes of love gained and lost, of comfort found in empty spaces and full bottles.
As they danced, they bumped into other couples. Aaliyah and her husband. Andrea, out from behind the dispatch desk with her fiancée. Brooke was in uniform, technically on duty, but David insisted she take the time for a few dances with Spady. Someone kept putting beers in David’s hands, and he and Sunny drank as they danced.
He searched the crowd for Charlotte but didn’t see her.
“I like this,” Sunny said.
“Me, too,” he said.
As they carved a slow circle, David’s eye wandered above the skyline to the west. It was nearly a new moon. The night was dark enough to shroud the giant. There was only a black space in the sky, where stars could not be seen.
The music stopped then. Dale stepped up out of the crowd, moving slowly to the stage. He looked old, David thought. No longer the imposing force that he had always been but an old, tired man.
Dale leaned into the microphone, which squawked. He tried again.
“Good evening, everyone. Thank you for coming tonight,” he said, his voice stiff. “It’s time now for the crane dance. Good luck finding a partner.”
Men all began moving to one side of the street, women to the other. David let go of Sunny’s hand.
“What do I do?” she said.
“Don’t worry. I’ll find you,” he said, retreating.
As David neared the far sidewalk, he saw Charlotte. She stood off the street, to the side, observing the dance, not taking part. They exchanged a quick wave, and then the crowds consumed them.
The men and women gathered in great flocks on opposite sides of the street. As they did, David thought of Charlotte and of the way the very structure of this dance—boys and girls, women and men—pushed her away, reminded her that she didn’t belong. He wanted to say something to her, but she’d disappeared. He would seek her out later. Not that he knew what it was like to be her, the pain she’d suffered. But he was trying.
The band started in again, pulling David’s attention back to the dance. Slow, steady notes plucked on the banjo. Twang. Twang. Twang. Twang.
Among the men, the drunker or braver ones began to pantomime birds, arms cocked and clutched to their sides like wings, heads moving in swift bobs and nods.
Then the fiddler started in, a peppy melody, and the men began to preen and strut, showing off for the women across the street.
Guitar and drums layered on top, and men and women both fanned out, each forming a single line. As the music built, they marched together, in toward the center of the street. The outsiders lagged just behind, following the movements of the locals, who’d traced these steps since they were teenagers.
They came together, almost touching, then fell back as the tune ebbed. This cycle repeated, stepping in on the rhythm, pivoting, parting ways. A hundred people, all moving as one body, undulating in unison.
Finally, the music built and built and then kept going, the tempo hastening as men and women linked arms at the elbow, partners finding each other, circling around, shifting at the down beat, linking opposite arms, twirling the opposite direction, moving so fast they seemed to fly.
David held Sunny tight. The centrifugal force of their movement tore at them, threatened at any moment to rip them apart, fling them opposite directions. David wouldn’t let go of her. He couldn’t.
The music shifted to a slow tempo. They held each other, swaying. Sunny pushed back just enough to see his face.
“I’m kind of scared. Of this. Of me and you. It . . . It doesn’t make sense. But also, I like it.”
“Yeah. Me, too,” David answered.
The music picked up again to a faster song, and they let the flow of it carry them.
Charlotte watched, laughing, remembering. She’d only been old enough to take part in the dance once, before she ran away the following year. Growing up, she’d always imagined herself being on the women’s side of the street. But then she found herself at the dance, pulled with Jason and David and Spady to the men’s side, and she had a girl with her as a date, and that girl went across the street, to the place Charlotte knew she belonged, with the women.
When Charlotte lagged behind in the dancing, Jason and Spady had teased her, showing how much of a rookie she was as they pulled her along. The dance had been fun enough, but then the group of them had stolen away down a dark side street, where Jason had beer in his truck, and they’d started drinking, and suddenly her date—she remembered her name suddenly, Meghan—had kissed her.
Charlotte hadn’t thought about that kiss in a long time. Now she scanned the crowd, wondering if Meghan was here, if they would recognize each other. Charlotte wanted to see her, to explain, and she also dreaded it. As she told more people, a tangible weight had lifted. But there was another weight that appeared, a counterbalance. She was vulnerable now. She had begun to reveal herself, and word spread quickly among the locals. A few greeted her, and others eyed her warily from a distance, whispering.
She wasn’t ready for more of those revelatory talks that everyone expected. Not tonight. And she’d long since understood that the binary nature of the dance left no room for her. As the music hit a crescendo and the bodies flew around each other in the street, she slipped away, unnoticed.
There were streetlights along Main Street, a few of the larger side roads, and of course throughout most of New Town. But Charlotte quickly found herself on an unlit dirt road. She’d walked this way home from school two decades earlier.
Some of the houses and lots had changed so drastically she couldn’t remember them at all. Others looked unchanged, and she found herself flooded with memories of the people who lived there, times she’d visited, exploring on their bikes, sneaking out at night, a childhood that seemed to be limitless, without boundaries or restrictions. They had their imaginations and an infinite canvas on which to paint.
As she walked down an alley, she wondered if that was what had pushed her into storytelling as a career. All those years of playing make believe, of creating adventures, pretending they were superheroes. In all the years she’d been away, why had she never remembered that?
It was then that she became aware of a sound behind her. Footsteps on the sandy road that didn’t match her own. She turned.
In the dark, she could only just discern the figure, some twenty yards away. A man with his face hidden beneath a hood.
For a few long seconds they stood, silent, each staring. Then he came toward her. He moved slowly. Patient, calculated steps.
Just as she was about to speak to him, she saw what he held in his hand. A blade, narrow and long and curved.
Charlotte’s hand dove into her bag, fingers searching through keys, her phone, tissues, makeup, a cylinder of lip gloss, searching for the tube of pepper spray. Where?
In the distance, the music thrummed, a jangly number, all guitar and drums.
Charlotte had no hope that anyone would hear her.
Still, as the dark figure took another step forward, she screamed.