It sounds nice and sweet, their vocals, until the words seem to melt and sour, and whatever has them distracted is messing with the crowd too. The glob begins to spin like a globe, and I see more body parts. Tonya’s in there. She’s holding a naked, headless Barbie doll. It’s the one that I gave her, but it’s got these purple marks all over its breasts. The knot rotates again and tightens its grip around thighs and necks, and people start to call my name, and it’s all my names: Fe Fe and Fee and Fish. One of the voices is Meechie’s, so I run closer to the knot, looking for him. I think, I gotta get him out of this mess. I see him there, and he’s scared.

Then the sirens whip into full voice, and people snap: the voices screaming my name boom, and a migraine starts growing at the front of my head. The sirens get closer, and the volume of my headache rises too. The wailing and the pain in my head talk to one another until little lights—like soft thunder—twinkle in front of the knot. The police cars, as if they’re in a funeral line, drive down State Street six-deep. That’s when I hear the boom. It blows the knot wide-open, and all the bodies fall out of the knot in slow motion, and land shoulder to shoulder in a line stretching across the playground and State Street and through DuSable High School and past Wabash, Michigan, Indiana, Prairie, and Calumet Avenues. I am on a tour, moving down the line, looking at the bodies as if I’m in a streetcar with exposed sides.

The police are nowhere in sight by this part of the dream; their sirens are shut off, and Woody and Earl, who are dead now, and down in the lineup, aren’t singing anymore. Everyone is dead. Lil Man, who wasn’t a man at all, but a boy, and the other kids and the old ladies and the gangbangers and the mothers and the fathers—even the ones who wouldn’t claim their kids, because somehow, I know their secrets.

Ms. Rose, who sold us candy; and Mr. Muhammad, who peddled spoiled groceries; and Ali, who fried up pizza puffs; and Ms. Pierce, the giver of dreams; they all lie there, dead. I see Stacia by King Drive; her face is smiling, eyes closed. I always wonder why she lies there smiling, if it meant that she got what she wanted out of her life.

The other Buchanans are lined up together, one long row of the same face in different shades. Sweat has on a white tee with blood splashed on it. I still think he looks sexy, even like this, so my body always warms up, even in this nightmare.