Coming to the edge of the forest, not far from town, Jesse was surprised to see a large crowd, surprised since his parents had been so vocal in ordering him to remain inside that night when it seems so many other people were doing just the opposite. The crowd had their backs turned to him, in a semicircle, maybe one hundred in total; less like a crowd, he realized, and more like an audience. Those at the back and on the edges were holding burning branches, flickering lanterns, stage lights spitting red sparks into the night sky. They needed the lanterns since there wasn’t much moonlight, only a glimmer every now and then when the heavy clouds lumbered out of the moon’s way. Jess thought that this was a well-dressed group of people, considering they were in forest. There were women in crisp dresses. There were girls wearing matching outfits. The men wore shirts, tucked into their pants. It was like they were dressed for church, or the theatre. Some people were fanning themselves with straw hats, ladies were shooing away mosquitoes and flies with dainty swipes of their dainty fingers, but Jesse could see the sweat stains on their backs; they weren’t so different from him after all.

They hadn’t noticed little Jesse, standing silently behind a tree – his arms full of wood, his hair knotted with leaves, his clothes as scruffy as if they’d been knitted from the foliage on the forest floor. The audience were captivated by what was happening in front of them but Jesse couldn’t figure out what could be so entertaining this far into the woods. He was too short to see what was happening and he didn’t dare move from behind the tree for the audience was all white and it wasn’t wise to interfere.

As though a spell had been cast, every single man and woman and child in the clearing looked up into the trees at exactly the same time. Jesse looked up too, hoping to see a firework, a burst of brilliant stars. Instead, he saw what they had gathered to watch – it was a dance, two legs dancing in the sky; a jerky dance, not like one he’d ever seen before, a dance where the two black, shoeless feet didn’t touch the ground, a dance without rhythm and without music, a silent dance that lasted no more than a minute or two.

By the time those legs were done with their dance, Jesse had crushed all the twigs in his arms and his shoes were covered in ground-up bark. A man in the audience lifted up a bulky box camera and a bulb flashed, burning bright for an instant and exposing everything hidden by the night. To this day Jesse wondered why the man waited till the end to take his photograph. Maybe he didn’t want to miss a moment of that entertaining dance.