Dance

Look back.

It’s Halloween many years ago and getting dark, as a storm plunges through Manhattan’s canyons. But the girls are coming! Forty brave girls, girls from every corner of the city, are speeding with their parents to a school dance, no matter the weather! And boys, those forty boys waiting for them, are hopping around like it’s spring, like they’ve all hotfooted each other!

In the old stories, great winds herald new kingdoms. Eisenhower’s nearly done, and the Land of the Dead beckons to soldiers getting off a plane in Saigon and to the first atomic submarine slipping into Long Island Sound. And Jack Kennedy’s face, which shines its energetic signal on the dusk’s roiling clouds that all must jump with Jack over his candlestick, that Jack must be powerful over America’s swelling darkness, giddy with skipping ghosts everywhere.