I am watching them take up heads and at first I think they kiss them—but they sink their teeth into the dead lips, and a helper ties a black band around the crowns of both dead and living heads so that they are clamped eye-to-eye together, noses side by side. The students dance with heads bound to their faces—I see one with a woman’s head shaking his whole torso so that her long black hair is a cloud around his shoulders. They brandish their rods and flails, one in each hand, and begin striking these together in frightening precise patterns like a vast duel with interchanging partners. These dancers form a ring within the ranks of the shroud dancers, and another group comes forward—they take a head in each hand, by the hair, by the nose, by the lips or ears, by the shreds of skin hanging from the neck. Two rush forward with a slopping, heavy basin, and I smell something like creosote. The heads are dipped in a two-part fluid unmixed clear and brackish like oil and water, and touched to the green flames of long corpse candles in the hands of giggling little boys and girls. Then the dancers spin around the fountain tracing green and blue comet streaks with faces that are only shadow blots in gobs of fire, whirl until they are only underlit smudges in hoops of fire. I can hear the hollow rustle of the flames as they whip grunting through the air. The dancers spin faster and faster and some of them smash their heads against the stone of the fountain or on the ground, and the crowd seems to want to be spattered with the sparks and dead matter that splash out from among the students. The lifers, with nervous smiles, edge closer and then scamper back into the crowd like someone playing tag with the surf. They seem to want to feel the sparks hit them.

The dancers slam the ground, they pound the stones with their feet and flail heads and hands, fire and cries in the air—cobblestones and severed heads fly crashing into the windows and crazed celebrants fling themselves on the buildings, the street, the fountain, ripping the stone with bare hands, snapping off teeth biting the stones, everywhere a sound of flesh beating stone. Now they take their burning heads and running off down all the boulevards of the city, where all other lights, I see, have been extinguished. The only light until dawn will be the streaking fire of burning heads in runners’ hands, racing up and down the streets of the life precinct at random. Even when dawn begins to well up in the sky, I will catch sight of a few last funereal rioters, bounding along the streets with long, graceful ten-foot strides, bundles of orange fire spilling from their upraised hands.