Free The End by Salvatore Scibona

job. It was damn hot up here. His skull vibrated in sympathy with the noise from outside.
    Crouching, and careful to balance himself on the joists, he made his way to a ladder in the attic wall. It was flaked with rust, and the mooring bolts were loose in the blocks, and the ladder shook as he climbed to the trapdoor in the rafters.
    He emerged in the rooftop twilight and breathed. The music, if you could call it music, was close by and deafening. He twisted his head around, and wouldn’t you know, peering over the wall that formed the top of the façade stood five girls and a little boy. He held out hope that Chiara was among them.
    “How did you get up here?” he called to them, brushing the spi derwebs and sawdust from his pants.
    “We climbed,” one of them said. There was a run in her stocking and a fresh, bloody scratch down her leg. She didn’t turn to address him.
    “What did you climb?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know.”
    “The wall, I guess.”
    “You have a cut, little miss, on your leg there,” he said, pointing, but she didn’t answer him.
    He approached the ledge and observed the tumult below. He was wet with exhaustion and defeat. One two three four five. No Chiara. Sigh. And the boy.
    “It’s always the same,” another said, disconsolate. “Why is it always the same?”
    “It’s opposed to be the same,” said the boy.
    They meant that year in, year out, the procession was always the same.
    Then one of them jolted upright. Then the others. The first poked the air. “Look!” she said. “Look at the shines!”
    All told, the procession was five blocks long. The Virgin now teetered at Eleventh Avenue and Thirtieth Street. An empty space of half a block, which people had historically enjoined themselves from entering, followed the band. At the edge of this space, a colored woman and a colored man were dancing.
    Shortly, they were joined by some other colored men and colored women, not too many, about seven. They were clapping, he could see, and doing a slow-stepping, herky-jerky dance, invisible, as one is in a crowd, so they surely believed, while the fevered, dissonant music kept playing. Funny. They weren’t in the conventional man-to-woman, two-by-two embrace, nor even holding hands. They were nine, now, out of maybe twenty thousand, pretty inconspicuous even from up here, and upon more careful observation they were all young people, even teenagers, although one more, a girl younger than the girls on his roof, tried to wrest herself from the grip of a white-haired, squat colored lady and join them.
    The children, renewed in their boredom, commented wearily in phrases of forced adult courtliness on the multitude. “Maria, Maria, but we are in so many,” one said.
    Rocco had to envy the colored kids down there, dancing with the herd and by themselves at the same time as though they weren’t obliged to pick one or the other. Either they were naïve, or he had made a needless choice. If he were ever put in jail, he hoped they wouldn’t let him have a window.
    A white-haired colored man in a tan suit and black tie was hissing, it looked like, beside the squat lady and pointing at the dancers and then back at his feet, furious. And Rocco had to shake his head at this poor, forbidding fellow so much like himself.
    Somebody smacked the lone tuba player on the back, Rocco saw this, and the mighty instrument turned around like a stag in the brush.
    Then—he could see this happening, he actually watched it happen—the remainder of the back row of the brass turned as one man, saw the Negroes dancing, and turned forward again. They in turn tapped the shoulders of the drummers, who turned and craned to see. And this smacking of the back and craning to see progressed row by row up the band at terrific speed. As you watch, from high banks above, a stick make its way down a river. And the band kept playing—they saw, they passed on the news, and kept playing. And he could see this