DANSE MACABRE

The square between the main house and the adjacent buildings on each side is a place where ghosts are supposed to dance, forever twirling under dark skies. No sober farmhand dares cross it past midnight, or at any hour after sunset if the moon is too young. Even those seeing double seem to know better.

But it is midday now. The sun bleaches every once blood-soaked stone into white incandescence, reducing the square to a pool of scorching reflected light most gazes are not foolish enough to linger on.

From his bedroom window, the boy looks down, squinting through the jalousie, wondering if that is where ghosts do live, in the porous flesh of white marble flagstones, dreading they may be in his own blood; forever waltzing to manic melodies on some dark square between the buildings of his family’s jaded minds.