Denver Noir

Ways of Escape by Barbara Nickless

Union Station

The dogs heard me coming before I could see them in the dark. Rex and Terror, my dad’s hunting dogs, a pair of black Labs. He’d raised them from pups, loved them like children; they were the only creatures around here he never hit.

The Labs roused themselves in the dog run and shook off the night’s chill — the sound of their feet padding on concrete guided me as I edged my way forward. I was moving from memory so I wouldn’t need a light. Fifteen steps from my window to the dog run with a slight angle west to reach the gate.

My fingers clasped the latch and lifted it. My heart was thunder in my chest, banging out, Run, run, run! But I eased through the gate and patted the dogs’ rough fur, felt their noses warm and moist in my cupped hands. I fed them from the bag in the shed and knelt to whisper into their ears how much I’d miss them.

I’d thought about taking Terror with me. He was younger than Rex. Tougher. But if I took my dad’s dog, then he’d sure as hell come after me.

When I let myself out of the run, the dogs crowded after me, whining as I closed the gate. I wondered if they would miss me. I wondered if I’d see them again.

Seventeen steps to the side of the house. I was halfway there when the world turned a velvety gray, the stars morphing from diamonds to pearls. The house and the fence and the trees took form like a fade-in on a movie screen.

I picked up my pace. But as I cut around the side of the house and jogged past the porch, Mom called out softly, “Persephone.”

My name in her mouth was as soft as the rustle of silk. But it might as well have been a fist.

I stopped.

“Mom.” I hung my head so that my hair covered my face. I hadn’t wanted her to know I was leaving until I was long gone. So that he couldn’t ask her about it. So that she wouldn’t have to lie.

More than anything, I was afraid she’d ask me to stay. Because if she asked, I would. Which meant I’d never get either of us away from here. I’d disappear into the chaos of our home like wood surrendering to flame.

But Mom said, “I’m glad you’re going, Seph. Truly.”

I raised my head. She was on her feet on the porch, a white blanket around her shoulders. She hadn’t turned on any lights; all I could see in the spreading dawn was the swollen left side of her face, the mark of his hand still on her cheek. Last night, Dad’s rage had been a cyclone.

My eyes burned. “It’s not for long, Mom. Six months tops. I’ll have enough money saved by then. I’ll come back for you and we’ll—”

“Stop.” Her gait had a sideways hitch as she hobbled to the top of the stairs. “Just promise me you’ll take care.”

“I will.” The knife’s leather sheath pressed hard against my ankle.

“You know how much I love you, right?”

“I know.”

“Don’t forget it. Now go. I’m just going to stand here and watch my last child walk away.”

“Six months,” I said again. Then I turned my back on the house and her and once I was walking, I walked fast, staying in the weeds and out of the gravel on the long lane that led to the road, avoiding even that small sound. I turned back once, but though the world was brighter, the ranch house was nothing but angled darkness.

Mom was a mere patch of white.

My plan was to catch a westbound freight across the Colorado plains to Denver’s Union Station. Dad might tear apart our town looking for me. He might talk to the sheriff, get him to issue an APB.

But he’d never think to look for me on a freight train.

Union Station was my lodestar.

I walked for an hour in the warmth of the climbing sun. When I reached the rail yard fence, I turned back to take a last look at the faded homes, the broken asphalt, the row of businesses with their empty storefronts and dusty windows, the derelict slaughterhouse. I breathed in sunbaked earth and animal dung and a flat, fetid scent Mom called the reek of despair.

I gave the town the finger then slipped through the hole in the fence that I’d found two weeks earlier. The gap was hidden behind an old cottonwood tree and the boards all around were bright with graffiti. I wondered how many kids had used this opening to slip into the yard and catch out on their dreams, most likely headed to Denver, same as I was.

Two trains sat idle in the yard, just as I’d expected. I’d done my research — I’d memorized schedules and numbers. Not for nothing was I known as a nerd. I hunkered down next to a shed until I was sure the coast was clear. It would have been better to go at night when I couldn’t be spotted. But Dad didn’t let me sleep anywhere except my own bed. He would have known right away that I’d run.

When I was sure the coast was clear, I hurried along the westbound coal train, looking for an empty boxcar — the five-star hotel of rail riding. But I had to make do with a coal hopper. I clambered up the ladder and settled on the metal platform. It was spacious. The overhang of the car would give me some shelter and, as long as I lay flat, the steel skirting provided cover from any railway police.

My biggest fear was that once Dad realized I’d run, he’d hire Mark Endcott. The first time my dad hit my mom hard enough to break something, it was Endcott who showed up at our door after I called 911. My mom told him she’d tripped, and he’d told her she should be more careful.

He’d known damn well what had happened. No doubt he’d had a good laugh with my dad about it later. Can’t let ’em get uppity, he’d probably said.

Endcott left the sheriff’s office a few years back and opened a private practice. He spied on cheating spouses and roughed up anyone who bounced a check or couldn’t pay their tab at the Dirty Saddle. He also hunted down runaways. A lot of kids took a good hard look at their parents’ lives — the debts, the violence, the alcohol — and decided they weren’t sticking around to see how things turned out. After hanging out his shingle, Endcott found nine of those kids and hauled them back. When he dropped them off with their parents, they were all sporting bruises.

The coal hopper gave a hard jerk. The floor of the platform vibrated. Metal shrieked up and down the line.

I broke into a sudden, terrified sweat. For a moment I was so scared that I almost jumped clear of the train with the thought that I could get home before Dad even knew I’d been gone.

“Stronger every day,” I whispered to myself. It had been my mantra since I was thirteen.

Surely some of it had stuck.

I crawled to the edge and watched as the train picked up speed, the floor humming beneath my hands and knees. Minutes later, we were out of the yard and rolling past yellow-gold grassland. Hereford cattle grazed in the distance. Clouds swept over the sun and the sky turned gray, heavy with the hope of rain. I unlashed my tarp from the frame of my backpack and used the pack to hold it down until I needed it.

Then I leaned out. The wind slapped my face and made a flag of my long hair.

“You can go to hell, Dad!” I screamed. “I’m free!”

A few hours into the day, the clouds began to spit rain. I’d unrolled my sleeping bag as far as possible from the deadly gap between the cars, and now I crawled inside and drew the tarp over. I pulled out the only postcard my brother Russ had sent after he’d run away; he’d mailed it to a friend with orders to pass it along in secret. It was a photograph of Union Station. On the back he’d written, Made it! Job hunting. I’ll be back for you both!!! Much love, Russ.

He never came back.

I tucked the postcard away and propped my chin on my folded arms.

I knew that when I got to Union Station, I’d feel like I was walking into Nirvana. Already I had soaked up every available fact about the place. It was located in Denver’s historic LoDo district; it was supposed to be one of the most beautiful stations in the country; it had been around since 1858 and was listed in the National Register of Historic Places; it was the only station in the country that provided bus, light rail, and passenger train service. The immense neon sign, Travel by Train, that hung over the entrance was both a recommendation and an homage to a bygone era.

I rolled onto my back, stared at the dull light filtering through the tarp. The rain carried the sharp-edged stink of coal, which was a thousand times better than the stench of manure.

As soon as I got to the station, I’d take a self-guided tour. Visit all the shops. Eat at the Cooper Lounge on the mezzanine overlooking the Great Hall. Buy a book at the Tattered Cover bookstore. Soak it all in before I made use of the monthly bus pass I’d purchased online long ago, when I’d first decided to run. I’d use the pass to get to the apartment of a friend of a friend where I was going to couch surf, then use it to get around Denver while I looked for work. I’d be seventeen in another two days. Maybe I’d find a job in one of the fancy restaurants in LoDo. Maybe I’d get really lucky and nail a position at the Tattered Cover.

Most importantly, I’d stand where my brother had once stood. And my mother before him.

I pulled out my journal and made a sketch of Russ standing under the Travel by Train sign. My pen skittered across the page with the jittery motion of the train.

I wondered what the kids at school would think if they could see me. Persephone the nerd. The bookworm. A literary dork making her own Huck Finn journey on a river of steel.

I knew what else they called me. The dweeb with T&A. After I turned thirteen, my body betrayed me by taking on the hourglass curves of my mother. Boys who’d been my friends started to look at me with a hunger I didn’t understand. I don’t think they understood, either. They were stumbling blind, driven by an instinct that told them I was something they should own. By high school they’d learned what their hunger was about. And I’d learned to wear loose clothes and walk with my arms crossed over my chest. And to never drink at parties.

Dad had begun giving me the evil eye every time I left the house. He never laid a finger on me. Not in that way. But sometimes I caught the same hunger in his eyes.

After a time I set aside my journal and lay down, using my sweatshirt as a pillow. I fell asleep to the iron lullaby of the train, a long, slow song punctuated by a concussive wind slapping the plastic tarp.

My mother was a classical pianist, and years ago she played at a lot of venues in Denver. Twice she toured in Chicago. If you look up her name on YouTube, you’ll find clips of her performances. She fell in love with my dad when he was a violinist with the Colorado Symphony. That was before he lost three fingers clearing debris from a lawn mower. Long before he decided they should move to eastern Colorado and try ranching. Three months after they moved, Mom had Russ. A year after that I came along. Dad got himself elected city manager and — the way he told it — got back some of his self-respect.

Disappointment turns some men mean, and by the time Russ was in middle school, Dad was a tyrant. Mom said that a man who’d played Vivaldi the way he once had still owned his soul. But Russ and I knew the truth. Dad must have dug down deep to find the kind of cruel he carried. He wasn’t coming back from that.

After I was born, Dad said Mom shouldn’t travel and leave her family. And besides, a city manager’s wife needed to be visible in the community. She stopped touring and took up the church organ. Everyone agreed that she was the best organist they’d ever had at First Faith.

Throughout my childhood and early teens, my brother Russ was my best friend. He looked after me, teased me, shared his cigarettes and books. Took our dad’s punishment for both of us. Then, when he turned sixteen, he left town. Dad notified the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He had Russ’s name posted in all the places you post those things.

But after that postcard I figured he was probably dead. If he was alive, he would have come back for us, like he’d promised.

After Russ left, Mom sold her piano. She stopped playing the organ as much. And after Dad broke her hand last year in some weird echo of his own loss, she didn’t play at all, not even when the cast came off. Now and again I’d come home from school and surprise her listening to Bach or Schubert on the classical music station. But whenever she saw me, she’d snap off the radio.

One time I asked her why she’d stopped playing. She sat down at the table and said, “Sometimes we start off with the wrong dream, that’s all.”

“Your dream wasn’t wrong,” I told her.

But she just shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Your dad won’t stay like this.”

“Mom.” I dropped my backpack and put my arms around her. “We should leave.”

Her eyes darted to the door and she dropped her voice to a whisper. “There’s no escape, Seph. Not from a man like your father.”

Dimitria Argos used to be beautiful. Lush and earthy, the kind of woman who would have caught Zeus’s attention if the myths were real.

Dad was no Zeus, but he’d changed her life forever.

I woke to the shriek of metal as the train slowed and slack rippled down the line, jerking each car like a terrier shaking a rat. I braced myself as the ripple reached my car and rocked it violently before continuing on down the line.

A short time later, the train stopped.

It was late in the day. I rose to my knees and fumbled in the twilight for my flashlight. I tucked it into a side pocket of my backpack so that the beam shone upward, bouncing off the metal sides of the car, then dug for the cheese and crackers and grapes I’d brought. I made up a plate for myself and perched on my knees so that I could see over the skirting.

It was near dark; the horizon glowed red, as if volcanoes were erupting just beyond the curve of the earth. Darkened farmland stretched like wall-to-wall carpet, with hills rising in shadowy humps in the distance. Beyond them, the Rocky Mountains rose blackly, stars mere pinpricks in the gloaming.

The mountains meant we were close to Denver. That frontier city turned millennial haven, with the most beautiful sunsets in the world, according to my mom.

I leaned out. Nothing but train in either direction.

And, a short way down the line, a small light that bobbed and weaved along the tracks.

I ducked back and switched off the flashlight. My heart took off at a gallop that made my stomach heave. I pressed myself to the floor of the platform.

Was it possible? Had someone spotted me getting on the train and called the sheriff? Could my dad have ordered the train to stop?

I cried out when, from the east, there came a roar and another train shot past. An intermodal with right of way.

“Hey!” called a man, after the noise of the passing train subsided. “I saw your light.”

I clenched my fists and hunkered down, squeezing my eyes shut like a child. Anyone will tell you, I’m timid. Like a mouse. Keep your head down, get good grades, don’t do anything stupid — my refrain of survival.

Beneath me, the platform shuddered as feet hit the ladder.

“Hey!” the guy shouted again.

The intermodal was now far in the distance, carrying its voice with it. The night fell silent. Then footsteps rang out on the platform.

“Why, hello,” said the man.

I unscrewed my eyes and looked up.

He was a silhouette cut out of fire. I couldn’t make out any detail — not his age nor the color of his clothes. He was just a man-shaped hole against the sunset.

But I could smell him. Grease and smoke and rusted iron.

He crouched next to me and held up his light. I studied him while he looked me over. He had blond dreads and eyes the color of topaz. He wore a pair of jeans and heavy boots and an old rain jacket. He eased back the hood. He was actually kind of cute, and maybe not too much older than me.

He grinned. “I saw your light. Thought you’d want company.”

“I don’t,” I said stiffly. Relieved he wasn’t my dad. Terrified as to who he might be instead, cute or not.

The grin got wider. His teeth were perfect. “I’ve been waiting two days for a train to stop. And here comes one with a beautiful woman on board. You going to kick me off?”

“There are lots of cars. Pick any one but this one.”

He settled onto his haunches. “You haven’t been on the road very long, have you? Don’t see too many girls out here. Mostly dudes.”

I said nothing.

“That’s okay. You’ll get to know what lonely feels like soon enough. Are you hungry?”

“Please go.”

Instead, he slung off his immense pack and settled in next to me. He rummaged through the pack and came out with a camp stove, a can of butane and another of beans.

“I got plenty to share,” he said. He thrust out a hand. “Scrape’s my road name. But the name my parents gave me back when they thought they’d make good parents is Hayden.”

I responded automatically, shaking his hand. His knuckles were rough with scars.

“You have a road name?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then with those curls of yours, I’ll call you Ebony Locks. Or maybe Brains, since you look smart with those glasses. And I do like smart women.”

“Really?” I couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice. That’s what boys said to me before they tried to get my pants down.

But he laughed. “It’s true. Smart women and smooth whiskey.” He pulled out a large bottle of Old Crow, uncapped it, and took a long swallow before passing the bottle to me. “Finest dinner you can have on the road. Beans and bourbon.”

Surprised at myself, I took a swig.

While we waited for the beans to heat up, he turned on a battery-powered lantern and shared a handful of photos he kept in a pocket. A brother. A younger sister.

I found myself showing him pictures of Russ and my mom. “She studied at Juilliard,” I told him. “Her dream was to play at Carnegie Hall. She would have made it.”

“What happened?”

“My dad.”

I showed him my favorite picture — the one of my mom standing inside Union Station. Dimitria stood on the stairs that led from the Great Hall up to the elegant mezzanine. It was impossible to tell whether she was ascending or descending. Either way, she was radiant in her green gown with her throat and shoulders bare, her curls swept into an updo.

“You look like her,” Hayden said.

But I shook my head.

After we ate, we curled up in our sleeping bags on opposite sides of the platform and watched a storm ignite over the mountains. It was headed our way, shimmers of lightning illuminating a bruised sky.

Not long after, the train started up again.

I woke in the pitch black. The rain sheeted down. I snuggled down into my sleeping bag, and that’s when I realized Hayden was next to me.

“You were screaming,” he said into my ear.

I’d been having a dream that Endcott hunted for me. He walked along the train, shining his mega-beam flashlight into every car, tilting his head back to sniff the air like a hunting dog. He was muscle and claws and teeth. When he found me, I saw myself through his eyes: a mouse in a trap.

The wind turned, and rain came in sideways, sluicing across the platform. It felt hard enough to sweep us right off the train.

“You’re shivering,” Hayden said. He propped himself up and turned on the lamp, so our little space glowed beneath the tarp.

I huddled against him and his arm around me was hard with muscle. He braced himself to keep us from sliding on the slick floor as the train rocked.

“You smell good.” His voice was slurred.

We were both at least a little drunk.

I considered turning toward him to offer my lips to his. Then his hand found my breast.

“Stop!” I kicked back against him.

But he just shifted and moved back in. “I can keep you warm.”

What I smelled on him now was a carnivore reek of adrenaline and wildness. I’d smelled it often enough on my dad, right before he drew back a fist.

“No, Hayden. No.” I talked to him like he was one of my dad’s dogs. Firm. No room for argument.

“Come on,” he said. “I fed you. Gave you bourbon.”

We swayed as the train rounded a bend, helpless against the tidal force of the rails. We were helpless against almost everything. Whether we were smart or stupid, weak or bold. Whether we were coddled as children or scorned. Birth strands us on uncertain ground and it’s up to us to find our footing. Many of us never do.

He rolled me onto my back. Water dripped from his dreadlocks into my eyes. I hadn’t been this cold since the time my dad took me hunting and couldn’t get a fire started.

Men, I realized, were like trains. Single-minded, relentless, chewing through whatever got in their way.

As Hayden groped, my terror built — a known and familiar thing. This was violence wound into what should be sacred. Ownership where there should be gifts given and received.

An image rose of my mom’s broken hand. Her voice saying, I was going to play at Carnegie Hall.

Fury lifted in me like a black, viscous liquid. I was filled with it, as if my blood had turned to pitch and then caught fire and now boiled beneath my skin.

I pulled up my knee and stretched my hand toward my ankle. My fingers found the knife hilt and I yanked the blade free.

“I’ll cut you!” I yelled.

He lifted his head, looked at me in surprise.

I didn’t mean for it to happen. The threat was meant to be enough. But the train jerked, and he rolled forward, and the handle slipped in my rain-slick hand. Without resistance, the blade popped through his flesh and bit deep.

He yelped and fell back. Blood filled his cupped hand. “What did you do?”

“I’m sorry!” I cried. “Oh my god, I’m sorry.” I yanked off my sweatshirt, wanting to stop the flow of blood.

He stared at me with wild eyes, then scooted away. I heard him scrabbling across the platform. The wind caught the tarp and sent it sailing into the dark. The lantern fell over.

“Let me help,” I called to him. “Please.”

The train curled into another bend. He struggled for purchase, and as the train righted again, he slid along the platform toward the crushing gap between the cars.

“Hayden!” I screamed.

For a second, as he teetered on the edge, I saw the boy as his parents must have seen him. Back when they still thought it was a good idea to be parents.

Eyes the color of a pine forest, hair like wheat.

There came another jerk of the train.

Then his cry as he plunged into the gap, followed by a sound like a wet slap.

Then nothing but the grinding of the wheels.

In the morning, I hopped off that freight and walked across the Denver Millennium Bridge and into Union Station. The place was everything I’d hoped it would be. Beautiful and polished and filled with light and the bustle of people who had places to go, things to see. But for me, all the shiny and new, all the tantalizing smells and the gorgeous things in the gorgeous shops, all of it was just hollow glitter now.

Now I had to keep moving.

Whenever I sat still for too long, I became a bomb ready to explode.

Maybe that was what I’d always been. Maybe that was the definition of a murderer — a person not too much different from everyone else. Until someone finds their detonator.

Like a moth to a light, I went into the Tattered Cover bookstore. The main store was only a few blocks away. But this tiny space still caught the flavor. I searched through a rack of postcards and found the one Russ had sent me.

“May I help you?” a woman asked.

I turned. A woman not much older than me, with gold curls instead of black. Glasses not too different from mine. I could have been her, in a different life.

I wanted to ask her how long she’d worked there. If she’d ever seen a boy who looked like me. Instead I said, “Do you have any postcards that show Union Station before it was renovated?”

“You mean historical ones?”

“Not that long ago. The late 1990s or so. My mom came here back then.”

Her brow furrowed. “There aren’t any on the rack. But if you give me a second, I’ll look in the back room. We keep a lot of stuff related to Union Station there.”

She called out to someone named Josh to watch the register and disappeared through a door. When she returned, she carried a slim stack of cards.

“Like these?” she asked.

I flipped through them. One showed the Great Hall with its immense wooden benches, where my mom would have waited for her train. A different one flaunted the mezzanine; its enormous windows revealed a sky the color of a Colorado pinyon jay. And a third showed the wooden stairs leading from the hall up to the gallery, the stairs where my mother had posed long ago, back when she could still make music.

I bought them all.

I gave myself an hour to take in the rest of the station and to think about what might have been. I found two of the original wooden benches. I studied the white rosettes around the sconces — symbols of the columbine, the Colorado state flower. I spotted the original ticket window, now incorporated into the Terminal Bar. I paused beneath the hall’s sixty-five-foot ceiling and imagined walking up the stairs to the Crawford Hotel and staying in one of its specialty rooms — one styled like a luxurious nineteenth-century Pullman train car.

Then I went back outside under a gloriously blue sky and breathed in the air I’d planned on breathing for months, maybe years. I walked through the glass doors of the Union Station Pavilion, which housed the underground bus terminals, and descended the staircase. I checked the departure times and gates. I’d crash at the friend’s house for a couple of days while I decided on my next move — my next city, my next state, whatever took me away and away and away.

The tunnel seemed to go on for miles. Three football fields, I remembered reading. I located my gate and sank onto a bench.

A transit cop came strolling by. Bile rose hot and sharp in my throat. In the tunnel’s soft light, it was like all the metal on the officer glowed. Like he radiated. Like he was shedding sheets of electricity in curtains that snapped and sparked.

He drew closer.

Tell him, said a voice. It was an accident. Tell him.

I buried my face in my arms.

Tell him. Before it’s too late.

A familiar voice said, “Seph.”

I lifted my head before I could stop myself. Not three feet away from me stood PI Endcott.

The transit cop walked on by without a glance.

“Well, well,” Endcott said. “I’d’ve thought you were smarter than that, Seph. Purchasing a Denver bus pass with your debit card. Guess you thought we wouldn’t look back that far. Wouldn’t put two and two together. You’re the smartest kid in school, the teachers tell me. But here you are.”

He sat next to me, put a hand on my knee.

“It’s time to go home. Your dad’s got a few words he’d like to say to you.” He smirked and leaned in, took a sniff. “You smell, girl.”

He stood. I noticed for the first time how soft he’d gone since leaving the sheriff’s office. His belly poked at his shirt. His face carried rolls of fat around the neck, like linked sausages.

“Come on, girl.” When I stood, he gave me a push. “I’m right behind you.”

I dragged my feet all the way back out, feeling acceptance of my fate suck like mud at my heels. I heard Mom’s voice saying, Sometimes we start off with the wrong dream, that’s all.

Sometimes, I wanted to tell her, someone steals our dream.

Outside, the sun was still a blaze of glory in a sky like the vault of a chapel. People hurried by, gulping down sandwiches and lattes, checking their phones, chatting with friends.

I walked over to the light-rail tracks and watched a train approach.

“What are you doing?” Endcott gripped my elbow.

I had choices. Even with a blackened soul, I had choices.

There were a lot of different ways to live your life. When you’d done something you never thought you were capable of, it opened doors into a dark place filled with infinite possibility.

There was power to be had, once you found your detonator.

I thought hard about it as the train pulled into the station, only feet away. A stumble. A nudge.

But that would be letting a short-term goal get in the way of something far more important.

The train pulled to a stop.

Maybe I no longer deserved a shot. But my mom did.

Carnegie Hall, here we come.

I pulled free of Endcott’s grip and gave him a smile that made his eyes narrow. I turned on my heel, heading away from the vast station with its terminals and train tracks, its historical building and pavilions.

He hurried after me. “Seph? Persephone! Young lady, slow down.”

“Why don’t you walk faster?” I tossed the words over my shoulder. “I know my dad is dying to see me.”

Sangre by D.L. Cordero

Auraria

“Gota.”

Rogelio heard the whisper from his threadbare blue recliner, drowsy brown eyes opening to the feel of goose bumps creeping up his legs. The bedroom he shared with his second-youngest brother was vacant, save himself, as the whole two-story brick house should’ve been despite the rustling in the hall. He leaned forward, straining to listen, looking at his watch.

Only five minutes past nine.

His trim black eyebrows knit together. His mother, father, sister, brothers, aunt, uncle, and cousins should all be at Mass, praying with the rest of the parish that continued to gather. He couldn’t bring himself to go with them, a hesitance that boiled into heated arguments with his mother. No matter how much she guilted him, he couldn’t be persuaded into stepping foot inside another católica after Archbishop Casey had every priest in Denver tell its people to vote for the bond that robbed Rogelio of his home.

La alma de la comunidad, that’s what St. Cajetan’s was. And still those pillos used her to undercut their fight. The city would’ve torn the church down too if his people hadn’t managed to save it, something they couldn’t do for their own homes and businesses. He could still hear Father Garcia reading the archbishop’s letter. His chest burned, words cutting, mind reeling through confirmations, weddings, funerals, Easters, Christmases, all the life lived in and around that church.

“Gota.” Footfalls followed the voice that he couldn’t believe was speaking. Hot sunlight made the back of Rogelio’s head and neck itch, sweat. He tried to steady his breath, heart knocking against teeth, nails tearing into armrests.

“Dame una gota.”

He didn’t understand what the whistling voice was asking for. A drop? A drop of what? His eyes widened when a shadow darkened the lip of his door.

Light, insistent knocking. “Río.”

“¿Qu-quién es?” Stupid question. Only one person shortened his name like that.

The bookcase by the door, dressers, bunk beds, the coffee table by his feet, they all rattled. A ringing in his head grew unbearably loud. When tunnel vision set in, he squeezed his eyes shut.

Loose black hair and braids cascading over shoulders, red lips curved up, brown skin creasing around dark, friendly eyes. He saw her standing outside his door, wearing la falda roja he loved to climb into so he could play with silver necklaces that dipped under the collar of white peasant blouses. Bangles on her wrist chimed as she reached forward.

The doorknob turned. The bedroom door creaked. His eyelids peeled back, and Río stared, chest heaving, sweat pouring down his temples. At the threshold of the hallway, past his now open door, lay scattered pictures, a smattering of white feathers trailing from them, across his floor and into his lap.

He shot up, walked into the hall.

Every photograph at his feet was of her and him, his gaze landing on one with his younger, little body balanced on her hip outside the family home that had stood two blocks west of St. Cajetan’s. The Auraria home was now broken beams and rubble, lost two months after they lowered her body into the ground.

Tears beaded at the corners of his eyes. Heat in his face, down his throat, into his belly. “I’m angry about it too.” He wiped his cheeks. “No se que hacer.”

“Dame una gota.”

The sound of running followed the whisper this time, chills rushing down his spine. He grabbed the picture, chased after the footsteps until he rounded a corner. The chain was swinging from the ceiling. He took a deep breath and pulled, stairs to the attic lowering with one smooth yank. His feet clattered up worn, hollow steps and pattered across the gray planks he swept once his family moved out of public housing and into this place by Lincoln Park. They somehow managed to buy it after scrimping and saving when the city underpaid them for their former home.

A breeze swept past his face, rustling the hem of the white tablecloth he’d laid over the wooden table he’d waxed himself. The altar was coming together, albeit slowly, with Río decorating it privately during the days leading up to Día de los Muertos. She was the one who’d taught him how to prepare, how to honor and to celebrate. A woman standing in and out of time, she chose to reclaim traditions lost to their family. She was proud of what others said she should let go, held her head high when they saw her difference. He loved how she commanded respect, even if people scorned her for what she held sacred.

In the end, who did they seek when they were sick? La bruja. La curandera.

Her red lips curved into a knowing grin when they returned to her and their people’s wisdom.

Río dug into his pockets, found a lighter and a plastic-wrapped disc of marzipan candy. His heart slowed when he peeled the powdery round free and set la ofrenda on her favorite porcelain dish. His fingers traced the raised, painted roses and green stems running the dish’s rim, his other hand lighting the tallest of the white candles on the table. Rogelio set down the photo he’d brought from the hall, propped it against the candle as it burned. His feet backpedaled until they hit the legs of the fold-out chair he’d taken from Casa Mayan after it closed. The metal creaked under his weight.

He already had her picture centered on the second level of the altar; he had painted the frame gold two nights ago. The metallic sheen glistened in the flame and in the speckled sunlight peeking through the attic’s shuttered, round window. Resting over the purple, red, pinks, and blues of el papel picado he’d crafted, the tissue paper created a colorful skirt under her face.

He was missing several things. His anger toward the church made it difficult to place the saints and crucifixes on the top level. He would wait until the night before Día de los Muertos to put them up, leaving those supplies covered and stacked beside his chair. Her small plot of marigolds lay wasted under the rubble of the neighborhood. Río wasn’t sure if he would be able to buy any, with how tight money was. Same with copal.

But as he sat there in the dim light, it didn’t feel like she minded.

He wrapped anxious hands around knees. How the days dragged on without her. His father always kidded about how much he was like her, not understanding how true that really was.

“Tía Paloma,” Río’s soft voice floated onto the altar, stroked her picture, held up el dulce de cacahuate.

The house creaked and moaned.

“I’m listening, Tía.”

The white tablecloth billowed. He felt the cool breeze cutting through space like a knife, whirling around the tall white candle, red-orange flame dancing, Río feeling a heat spread across his cheeks as the fire brightened. Footsteps creaked toward him, slow, deliberate, heavy. The candlelight changed direction, spotlighting the house in the picture of Río and Tía Paloma until it felt like the fire was burning inside the windows.

And then he felt it, someone in front of him, the air dense and unmoving. Cold swept over his body like a hug, pushed him deeper into the metal of the fold-out chair. His vision blurred.

Blood in the streets. Blood in the ground.

He stood amid the rubble of the Auraria neighborhood dressed in a red skirt, huipil, and shawl, holding her hand, staring at the shape of the house they still saw silhouetted against moonlight.

She whispered in his ear and let go.

Río opened his eyes when he heard the front door open, not realizing hours had passed since he sat down. His family poured inside, bodies filling the two floors below him. Laughing, singsong voices swam into brick walls and ceilings. Bedroom doors swung open. Closets peeled back to receive dress shirts, pants, and skirts. Pans and cutting boards clattered in the kitchen, and soon he heard his mother calling for help with Sunday’s meal.

The candles on the altar had gone out. He sat in the dark, watching speckled sunlight fall on the photograph of his little smiling self in front of his home.

“Rogelio,” his father called from the base of the attic stairs.

He stood up, body heavy and relaxed.

“Rogelio, will you come?”

He strode across the floor. Before taking a step down, he glanced over his shoulder, eyes peering at the dark shape of Tía Paloma’s framed photo. “I’ll be right there,” Río said with a smile. “I’m coming.”

“What does he want it for?” his mother asked his father, in reference to the sewing kit Río wanted to borrow.

“Does it matter, Esther?”

He felt it best not to ask for it himself, since Mom huffed around the house past sundown. Throwing dishes into the sink louder than needed, groaning without prompting, and providing one-word answers. Queen of guilt trips, her quiet anger could seethe for days after being defied. He hoped to get used to it one day, but he cringed as he listened to his parents’ sniping from outside the closed bedroom door.

“But David, if he needs to patch something up, he can ask me to do it,” she kept on.

“Honey, just give me the bag.”

This would go on for a while. Río decided to head down into the kitchen, grab a cup of water, and wait for his kind-hearted dad. The scent of onions, garlic, oregano, guajillo, and ancho chilies hung thick in the air, remnants of el pozole he’d helped his mother and Aunt Rosa make. He hoped the aroma would bake into the walls and floors, stamp this house theirs, cover everything in cultura.

Drawing water from the tap, he sat at the dining table, not meaning to choose the wobbly chair, but in the dark he was still getting used to where everything was. He listened. His parents’ muted voices dropped like pebbles down the stairs, tinny laughter from sitcoms spilled from his aunt and uncle’s room, giggles from his younger brothers and cousins skipped across the living room ceiling. They always played under the covers past bedtime, parents turning deaf ears to the noise as long as the boys didn’t get too rowdy. He wondered what game it was tonight. Disco dancing or playing Dirty Harry. He hoped they weren’t pretending war like he found them doing last time. That always set their uncle off. Río’s ears sought out his six-year-old sister, but she fell asleep fast and hard at seven p.m. When he listened for outside, he found nothing but a few distant shouts and hushed rancheras. With the national fuel crisis, the streets were empty.

He stood, returned to the sink. Water rushed into his glass. His mind ran back to the box in his closet. He’d kept as many of Tía Paloma’s things as his family let him, whatever wouldn’t sell. He often held the cotton, polyesters, and rayons of her dresses to his chest, cried into them when he didn’t want anyone to hear. How many nights had he stared at his closet door, wishing his brother wasn’t in the bunk below him so he could try something on? He was roughly her size, slender and not much over five five. He worried about his shoulders, broader than hers, opposite of his hips, straighter than hers. And his feet, too big. He couldn’t imagine fitting into her sandals.

Río turned off the faucet, stepped back, and panicked. He whirled around after bumping into someone. Tall, looming over him, musk thick and heavy. Río shook, his glass shattering, water spilling across the floor. His bare feet cut and bled as he stumbled back, Río yelping at the dark figure there so close behind.

“You scare too easy,” Uncle Ernesto said, Río’s shoulders tightening at the raspy voice. “If you’re like that, pay more attention.”

Río gripped the sink, felt his knees knock when he smelled alcohol on his uncle’s breath. Didn’t take much beer for Ernesto to start calling him the names Río’s father forbade. Whenever Ernesto drank, Río worried he wouldn’t stop at names. He was getting bolder, scarier.

The refrigerator door opened, blue light casting shadows across the heavy bags under bloodshot eyes. Ernesto cracked open a Coors, his glare hot on Río’s face. Feet hurried down the stairs. Río’s father flicked on the living room light, then the kitchen’s when he saw blood on the floor.

“¿Qué pasa aquí?”

Ernesto gave his cuñado a sidelong glance. “What you mean, what’s going on?” He took a swig from the bottle, brown bubbles fizzing. “What’s it look like?”

“I don’t know what it looks like.” David stood in front of his child. “That’s why I’m asking.”

Ernesto’s cheeks pinched once his gaze drifted to what David gripped in his hand. Esther’s pink sewing bag. “I’m doing your boy a favor, hermano. Teaching him some damn situational awareness.”

David’s nails dug into the pink canvas. “Don’t you teach Rogelio anything. Go the fuck to bed.”

Ernesto cocked his head back. A dark, static laugh popped in his throat. He lingered there under the white kitchen lights, seconds stretching. The cuts on Río’s feet stung but he didn’t dare move, trying to shrink into his father’s back. Uncle Ernesto hadn’t been like this before getting drafted. They didn’t have the dough to keep him from going, so everyone cried because they thought he’d come back from Vietnam dead. He came back weird and angry instead.

“Ernesto, I told you to go back to bed.”

“You’re too soft on that boy, David.”

“I swear to God, if you don’t get out this kitchen.”

“What? You finally gonna show Rogelio what a real man’s like?”

“Carajo cabrón, I’ll make you get your sorry ass upstairs.” David stepped toward him with a swiftness that made Río’s hair stand. Must’ve had the same effect on Ernesto because he was retreating, though not without hate-filled jabs.

“That damn hippie’s gonna ruin your business.”

Río slid to the floor, his father chasing his uncle upstairs. Turning the sole of his foot inward, he picked at glass slivers.

“Quit being stupid about that job, it’s good money!” Ernesto yelled. “So what if the sissy doesn’t fucking like it?”

Río startled when it finally happened, the explosion months of tension built up to. Hard bangs against hallway walls, dull thuds of flesh on flesh. A shout and grunted moan when someone fell against the floor. Río froze. A bedroom door slammed shut. He waited, wiping his face as footsteps came back down the stairs. His shoulders dropped from his ears when he saw his father step into the kitchen.

David still held the pink canvas sewing bag. He set it on the counter, crouched, and reached.

“I’m okay. It was an accident.” Río pushed him back, looking him over but finding no damage. In the scenarios played out in Río’s head before falling asleep, his father usually won. Having trained as a boxer, David knew how to take and land a punch.

Río tended to his foot, wincing as he dug out glass shards from the arch and heel. He hated the way the corners of his dad’s lips drooped, the furrowed brow and narrowed eyes, would do anything to stop it. “It’s okay. Don’t worry.” Río chuckled, his voice high.

David grabbed a clean dish towel. Despite Río’s protests, he wiped the blood from Río’s hands and feet. “His disability will come in soon and Rosa’s up for a secretary job with El Molino. Just a few more days. I’ll watch him the whole time.”

“Papi, I’m fine.” Tight lips, eyes closing in a feigned smile. “Maybe he’s right. I can cut my hair.” He’d only started growing it out after graduating high school in May. “It’s shaggy and gets in my eyes.”

“Mijo,” David said firmly, but with a tenderness that held Río close, “no le hagas caso.” He tied the towel tight around Río’s foot, his rough carpenter hands tucking back loose strands of Río’s straight black hair. “It looks good on you.”

His eyes welled up. He fidgeted with his hands. “Thank you.”

The TV upstairs went off. No laughter in the house. Everyone was listening from unseen places. He stood, his father making him lean on him for support as he tested out the pain. Río held his face in a tight grimace when David insisted on helping him walk up to bed.

They mounted the steps, the creaking underscoring everyone’s quiet. Río couldn’t stand it. “What job was Tío talking about?”

His father paused. “Don’t worry about it, mijito.”

“’Course I’m gonna worry about it.” He frowned. “Work slows down going into fall. We need the money so what’s this job you don’t wanna take?” He leaned against his bedroom door, stared into his dad’s coffee eyes. Crow’s feet on weathered, light skin.

“They need supports put into St. Catejan’s and some of the houses on Ninth Street while they restore ’em.” David crossed his arms.

Río understood the hesitance, which wasn’t only about sparing his own feelings. After decades upon decades of his people living and growing in Auraria, the nice folks of Denver felt threatened by the largely Chicano neighborhood. Mayor McNichols went so far as to call it blighted. The tight-knit community didn’t even know that the Urban Renewal Authority had moved to build a college over their homes until the notices went out about having to move. His dad had been a part of ARO, the group of Aurarian residents that opposed the displacement. Now that the hammer had firmly driven the nail into the coffin, David probably didn’t want to set foot on the land he’d fought to keep.

“When did they ask you?”

David’s lips tightened. “This morning.”

“At church?” Heat boiled in Río’s chest. He sucked in a breath and let it out slowly, thinking about the box in his closet and Paloma’s picture on the altar. “Take it.” This was the opening he needed. “I’ll help.”

Río helped load the dinged blue Chevy pickup truck in the morning, sky gray with early dawn, late October air cold and dry. With their house on the corner of Lipan and Twelfth, he could see both the Lincoln Park Homes and the park itself, a scrappy piece of land with wide, bare cottonwoods and a swimming pool. The housing project he liked less, rows and rows of identical brick buildings. Square, no character, just darker brick for trim, chain-link fences to mark off brown yards, clotheslines that got so heavy they bowed out.

They took Mariposa Street up through Westside, crossed Colfax, and met the fenced-off stretch of land they once called home. After some waiting, cross-referencing with foremen, and finagling around chawed-up streets, they met with the white man who’d recruited Río’s father over the weekend.

It wasn’t too surprising that his dad got tapped for this. Wasn’t that what they always did? Take, and then have the people they’d taken from build? His father was a decently well-known carpenter, his business having branched into restoration jobs around Denver. With his light skin, straight hair, and first name, he was white-passing enough to be accepted into spaces other Chicanos weren’t. The last name De Santos sometimes confused people, but often, those who didn’t speak Spanish pronounced it DiSantis, which lead to conclusions about David being Italian.

Río didn’t have that kind of advantage. He stayed in the Chevy while his dad took a jaunt beyond the fenced-off section that protected stolen homes from the rest of the construction. Gates within gates.

He looked through the truck’s back window, heart clenching. They’d taken down the businesses and houses in sections, but now he could see all of the neighborhood was flush with the ground, piles of bricks and rubble scattered for miles. His eyes landed on what the vultures considered historic enough to reuse. St. Cajetan’s and its rounded Spanish façade, stained glass peeking over screened-in fence. He read the name Tivoli lettered on the smokestack of the brewery, followed St. Elizabeth’s tall spire to her gleaming gold cross. Immanuel Episcopal paled in comparison, Río barely able to see the peak of its roof past the frames for the new campus buildings. He hadn’t spent much time around that church, but now he longed to see its rough pink and gray stone face.

These four buildings would become shells, guts ripped out for revitalization. Again, Río thought about the word Mayor McNichols used to describe his neighborhood. Blighted. How was this repurposing of scavenged parts better?

David patted the hood of the Chevy, Río swiveling back to see the white man in his early forties wander off in the direction of the building frames, blue hard hat bobbing, cream-colored button-up tucked into khakis. Río opened the car door as his father pulled on his tool belt. Río’s feet hit rocky ground with battered brown work boots.

“We’re gonna measure.” David pointed at the pad of paper tucked under the passenger dashboard. Río grabbed it and slipped a ballpoint pen behind his ear. He followed his dad past the fence blocking off the Ninth Street houses. Thirteen Victorians on either side of a dug-up street, including Casa Mayan where he’d washed dishes during high school. Groussman Grocery stood on the corner, white stone balusters intact. Río still didn’t understand exactly how this part of the neighborhood got saved. Something about an anonymous donation to an organization calling itself Historic Denver. Fundraising, negotiations with the city, he’d kept up with the effort only in passing. Every time he heard about it, all he could picture were blue eyes seeing value in the homes of his neighborhood once everyone who loved them was gone.

David waved him over from the porch of number 1015. In the gray morning light its squared, hipped green roof and yellow brick walls looked sickly.

The rest of the day whirled by. A flurry of measurements, trips to the lumber mill, sawing, drilling, and hammering. Having stayed up most of the night patching a skirt and blouse in the attic, by the time his father ended their workday, Río was going cross-eyed. The only things he continued to pay close attention to were the entry and exit points to the construction site, the paths leading to the Ninth Street and St. Cajetan fences, and the width of the chains that looped them closed. For how contested the displacement had been, there was barely any security during the day. Come evening, he didn’t see anyone guarding the site after one of the workers rolled back the gate and padlocked it shut.

“Gotta make one more stop.” David rolled down his visor, blocking the lowering sun from his face as he drove.

Río closed his eyes, trying to rest. He planned to be up all night. He nodded off at the first stoplight heading back into the Westside, barely registering the truck being placed into park and his dad stepping out.

Maybe it took ten minutes, maybe thirty, but when David hopped back into the truck, Río felt something was different. He blinked, rubbed his brow, realized they were on Santa Fe outside Flores by Torres. Up and down the street, kids in costumes were already making their rounds, little vaqueros, ballerinas, and skeletons trying to get the best Halloween candy before the sun blinked out.

And in his dad’s lap sat trimmed marigolds wrapped in brown paper, one red rose amid the gold pom-pom blooms.

“I talked the foreman into paying me up front.” David pulled the rose free. Taking his pocketknife to the thorns, he shed them one by one, his face soft as he worked. “I knew you were missing these for tomorrow.” He slid the cempasuchitl into Río’s lap, small plastic bag of copal caught between the flowers.

Río’s voice caught. He’d always known his dad wasn’t like everyone else, that he was his own kind of family man.

“You can wear your hair however long you want, wear any clothes you want, see anybody you want.” He pulled Río’s face into his large, rough hand, undid the tight knot of hair at the nape of Río’s neck. “I’ve known a long time. Paloma helped me understand.” He tucked the rose behind Río’s ear, let heavy hair hide the stem. “There is nothing you can do that will make me turn my back on you.”

Río’s whole body sank into David, spilled sobs into his chest.

“What do you want me to call you? Dime quien eres.”

Río told her father about her plan on the drive home. David listened, hands at ten and two, nodding as he thought things over once he parked the Chevy outside the house. She was surprised when he offered himself as lookout, that he believed her without flinching. Her dad and Paloma were close, but it wasn’t until this moment that Río understood how deep their bond was.

He helped her string the marigolds like beads, insisting they work on the garland in the living room while her mom, sister, and brothers prepared tamales at the dining table, stack of corn husks toppling over. Vicente Fernández and Lola Beltrán warbled through the radio while arroz rojo steamed on the stove, replenishing the household aroma of garlic, onion and chilies. David explained that Esther had wanted to make this food after last night’s fight. That she and the children spent all day moving Aunt Rosa and Río’s cousins into their other sister’s house on the Northside.

“Esther,” David called from the living room, tying off a finishing knot. “¿Y Ernesto?”

She answered after a pause. “Rosa didn’t want him with them. I’m not sure where he went, but I made sure he knew better than to come back here.”

Río’s brothers snickered. Her sister chimed in: “Mommy played tag with Tío using a two-by-four.”

David asked Río to wait until the rest of the family went to sleep before slipping into Tía Paloma’s clothes. Mom still needed time before she felt comfortable explaining things to the kids, and it was best that no one else knew what they were going to do. At midnight, Río and her father slipped into the attic, David lighting the incense and placing arroz y tamales on the altar while she changed.

La falda roja plumed when Río let it fall from her hips to her ankles, the cotton soft and twirling as it moved. The black huipil had large red roses and marigolds woven into la tela, smaller ones embroidered in shining thread front and back, leaves decorated in three colors of green. Paloma’s rebozo matched the skirt, deep crimson, black hem and fringe. Río wrapped it around her shoulders, put the rose her father had given her back behind her ear, and smoothed down her black hair.

She turned toward her father. Her cheeks burned. Gaze trained on the floor, she took an anxious step forward, stopped when he looked over his shoulder and rose. His hand covered his mouth. Río clenched her shawl.

She gave a broken chuckle. “I bet it looks—”

David wrapped Río up into his arms and pulled her in tight.

Wordless minutes later, they pushed the truck half a block down the street before cranking the engine. They drove dark, empty streets for ten minutes, David turning off his headlights when they rolled beside the fence. Río hopped out before he came to a stop. She pulled the heavy-duty bolt cutters from her waistband and bore down on the padlock, forearms flexing, shoulders straining. She heard it snap and tore the chain away, pulled back the gate and rolled it into place the second her father backed the truck onto the construction site.

Under the clouded moon, David stepped onto the land. He took the chain from Río’s hands and wrapped it around the fence posts, pulling his own lock from his pocket. “Go.” He tossed her a flashlight. “Ten cuidado.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come see her?” She ground gravel as she pivoted toward him.

“You didn’t see me there when she showed you she wanted you to come.” He snapped the lock into place, patted her head. “Besides, I’ll see Paloma anytime I look at you.”

Río’s heart swelled.

“Watch for my headlights. One flash.”

She nodded and ran.

Her work boots pounded the dusty ground of the torn-up streets, the hem of her skirt in her hand, flashlight beam swinging in front of her. She darted toward the rounded curves of St. Cajetan’s, able to see them dark against the sky despite the black of the night.

“Gota.”

Gales carried Paloma’s voice to Río, gusts growing stronger the closer she drew near. She wheezed, the air cold and hard, but she kept dropping one foot in front of the other, even when she stumbled over rubble, even when sweat dripped into her eyes and stung.

She passed St. Cajetan’s, the church feeling too tall, walls pulling in and out, inhale and exhale. Río drove forward, thought the ground started to feel like membrane, soft and springy. Wind whistled high and low. Maybe the land was singing.

“Dame una gota.”

She skidded onto the dirt road that led up to the Ninth Street houses, veered right at their fence, knew where her home would’ve stood even though the streets were missing. Tripping her way down a rocky path, she scrabbled over rubble that jutted from piles, splintered wood beams biting into her forearms, shattered glass tearing at her palms.

She got caught on a broken wall a few feet off the ground, her thick locks grabbed by fractured rafters. She pulled but couldn’t break free, seeing stars in front of her eyes. Something translucent reached past her face, wind whipping into the wood and knocking it back.

She fell. The air knocked out of her lungs when she hit the ground.

Then she realized she was there. Río staggered to her feet, spun in place. “¡Tía!”

“Dame una gota de nuestra sangre.”

The clouds over the moon parted. Río turned off her flashlight and saw Paloma in wispy translucence, standing in front of the wreckage that was their home. Her intangible form wavered in the night, but Río could tell Paloma’s hand stretched toward her, palm upturned, fingers cupped. Río reached, her hand cut open from the glass of the ruins.

“Our blood is in the streets.” Paloma’s body became as solid and bright as the moon when Río’s droplets fell into her hand. “Our blood is in the ground.” Thick red pools grew under Paloma’s feet, spread into the wreckage. Wind gusting, earth shaking, broken bricks and girders rose from their open graves and stitched themselves back together. Paloma stepped toward Río as glass crashed into wholeness. Mortar slapping against brick, nails hammering into wood, shutters cracking open, and doors slamming shut. Paloma flashed so bright Río had to cover her eyes.

“We are the land,” Paloma whispered. Her hands wrapped around Río’s face. She pressed her cold forehead against Río’s, closed her eyes, and as she lingered, she grew warm.

Lights flickered on in the homes that stood tall again, gabled roofs cutting into the dark sky, colors deepening under the moonlight. Blue curving trims, red arches over windows, white brick shimmering with rainbows while pines and cottonwoods sprung from the ground.

Children chased barking dogs through swept dirt yards. Mothers gathered on porches, lips red, heads tossed back. Men smoked together on corners, shoving each other and smirking. Battered trucks puttered down paved streets, dandelions lining the sidewalks. Work clothes fluttered in the breeze, strung from crisscrossing lines. Aroma of baking bread, stewed tomatoes, simmered garlic, onion, and oregano. Milk bottles knocking by the dairy. Hops and yeast marrying in the brewery.

Paloma opened her eyes. St. Cajetan’s doors flung back with a scream, candles burning in the stained-glass windows. Hymns poured from the walls. Organs spun melodies. A torrent of blood rushed down the church steps, spattered into the street, joining the scarlet rivers seeping from the Ninth Street houses.

“Never let them forget,” Paloma’s voice echoed across the neighborhood. The ground pulsed. Río saw people she did and didn’t know rise from the earth to stand across Auraria. Skins of brown, bronze, and black, dark eyes turning toward the moon.

“Make them remember us.” Paloma spread her arms wide. “Walk tall and speak for those who have fallen.”

Four years later, Río stood beside her father, mother, sister, and brothers at the back of a crowd that gathered for a ribbon cutting at Metropolitan State College. Her thick black hair swept her waist as the wind rustled the red skirt she wore, silver bangles on her wrist shining in the sun. It was bright, the concrete hot. Río stared at the large brown square the city built over razed homes. Much of Denver was turning into the shape of building blocks. Río wanted to knock them all over.

A blue ribbon hung between hand railings placed on either side of the building’s glass door. Mayor McNichols stood in front of it, at a mobile podium with a speaker that made his crackling voice bounce across sidewalks.

“Today is a step forward for our city...”

David nodded at Río as he handed her his pocketknife. Lowering the rebozo from her shoulders, Río pricked one of her fingers while hiding her hands within the folds of the shawl. She passed the knife back and, after a few moments, lowered her hand to the earth.

She felt the heartbeat under her sandals.

The masses of brown, bronze, and black bodies rose from the earth as Río’s gaze returned to the blue ribbon before the doors. Thousands of her people surrounded the building, stood among the living, gathered beside, before, and behind the mayor.

Río held David’s hand. She asked him what he saw.

His eyes watered. “We’re closing in.” His breath caught. “We’re all closing in.”

The mayor’s grin flashed. “...we celebrate progress...”

Río ground her teeth, raised her bloody fist, and the ancestors opened their mouths when she opened hers.

Dreaming of Ella by Francelia Belton

Five Points

All he wanted to play was jazz, and to one day play trumpet to the First Lady of Song’s voice. So when the Miss Ella Fitzgerald walked into the Silver Sax one chilly November night in 1956, Morgan could hardly believe his dream might come true.

It was half past midnight, and the night was still young. Morgan swayed on stage, blowing a hypnotic tune on his trumpet and swinging with the rest of the fellows in the Sax’s house band. Along with his brass, piano and drums, alto and bass, jamming and jiving, thumping and thriving, just another weekend night down in The Points. The Harlem of the West. Welton Street in Denver was your last stop for jazz between St. Louis and California. And Morgan felt electric.

In between songs, Morgan pulled the yellow silk handkerchief from his tan cotton jacket, the best thing about his Sunday suit, and wiped the sweat from his face. Despite the cold outside, the room was sultry and thick with heat and tribal jubilations. Smoke and the aroma of beer hung in the air like fog after a snowstorm.

A smattering of couples sat at the round tables before the bandstand. Men in snazzy suits with carefully knotted ties, ladies in lovely dresses with strings of pearls, talking, laughing, taking sips from glasses of fancy cocktails or bottles of beer. Cigarettes perched on the edge of ashtrays or clasped between fingers, periodic drags producing tendrils of blue haze past parted lips.

A commotion broke out at the entrance, and people craned their necks to see what was happening. One of the bar girls hurried over to where the club’s owner, Charles, spoke with the bartender. He lowered his head so she could put a hand to his ear. Charles’s head snapped up, an incredulous look on his face. He peered over her shoulder as a statuesque woman walked in wearing her quintessential Edwards-Lowell sable coat. Charles rushed over to take it off her shoulders. They exchanged an enthusiastic greeting and hug. The buzz of voices in the club rose in pitch and volume, and Morgan knew what folks were saying without hearing their words.

That was the First Lady, and she had honored the Silver Sax with her presence.

Morgan’s ring finger paused midkey and his horn drifted from his lips. The note he blew hung in the air for the briefest of moments before vanishing from the ether. One by one his bandmates ceased playing.

Any of the greats could have walked into the joint, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, but tonight it was Lady Ella herself. The woman who took her vocal cues from the horns and made them her own. The woman who Morgan had listened to all his life and dreamed of meeting. The woman who now elicited a silence in the Silver Sax so deep, it commanded spiritual deference.

After an eternal moment, Miss Fitzgerald said, “Don’t stop on my behalf, boys. Keep playing.” Her voice irresistible and smooth. Her smile irrepressible and kind.

Morgan brought his trumpet back to his lips and picked up the notes he’d dropped off. The rest of the fellows followed his lead. There was a new energy flowing in and out of the club until the place burst at the seams with all the people suddenly pouring in.

Word was getting around... Lady Ella was in the Silver Sax.

In all likelihood, she had performed at one of the fancier venues downtown. As famous and revered as she was, however, even she was not allowed to stay in the hotels there. Denver was as segregated as any city down south. Tonight, she would be staying at the Rossonian here in The Points, where all the jazz royalty were welcomed with open arms.

Charles escorted Ella to the high-back cushioned booth seating running the length of the south wall. He instructed the staff to block off the seats around them so Ella wouldn’t be disturbed.

Morgan blew into his horn and his fingers trembled as he pressed down, up, down along the valves. Goose bumps took over his body, knowing Ella was listening to him, and he tried not to stare.

Charles and Ella chatted intently; their heads bowed together. At one point, Charles pointed to the stage, and Ella nodded with a discerning gaze. Her glossy, high-wave bouffant shimmered in the glow from the wall sconce above her head.

When Morgan and the band finished their last song before taking their fifteen-minute break, Charles rose from the table and approached the stage. To Morgan, he said, “Ella likes your chops. I told her you’re Milton’s boy. Me and your father played a couple of times with Ella back in Harlem.”

Morgan knew this. Charles had told him stories on more than one occasion about the jazz greats he and Morgan’s dad had jammed with. It was one of the reasons he wanted to be good as — no, better than — his dad. Morgan not only wanted to play a song with the Queen of Jazz, he wanted to be first trumpet in her band.

Charles beamed as if he were Morgan’s father. “Ella is going to grace us with a song tonight.” He leaned in so that only Morgan could hear. “I also heard she might be in the market for a new trumpet player, so show her what you’re really made of, son.” Charles winked.

Morgan’s knees almost buckled, and he gripped his brass for emotional support. He couldn’t believe it.

“Okay, boys, let’s do this.” Charles clapped his hands and bustled back to the table.

Morgan’s pulse raced through his veins, and he reached under his jacket to pull away the sweaty shirt from his skin.

Tommy grinned from ear to ear. He played multiple instruments, but the saxophone was his baby. “Man, what a night this is turning out to be.”

Ray, on bass, intoned as only an old man could, “Did I ever tell you about the time I got to play with Billie Holiday and she—”

“Yes!” they all chimed together, hooting with laughter.

Ray grumbled, “...young think they know everything.” He chomped on his cigar.

Heart thrumming, Morgan took a deep breath, brought his horn to his lips, but then lowered it. He needed to be smokin’ tonight, because he had only one shot to impress the Lady and be invited to play in her band. One clunker and he was finished. There were too many other cats out there who would swoop in and snatch the prize.

Someone brought the microphone and set it out front.

Larry, the bartender, made his way over to Charles and spoke in his ear. Another whispered conversation, but this time the expression on Charles’s face changed from anticipation and pride to shock. He looked right at Morgan. He took a deep breath and marched forward. The solemnity on his face a frozen mask.

Morgan’s heart sped up to a staccato beat. Was Charles going to pull him from the set to put someone in with more experience? Nothing doing! He was going to play his trumpet for Miss Fitzgerald if it was the last thing he did.

“Morgan, I’ve got something to tell you.”

Morgan shook his head. “No, you’re not taking my chance. I have been waiting for something like this all my life.”

“Your Aunt Beatrice called. You’re needed at the hospital.”

Morgan furrowed his brow and shook his head. “I don’t believe you.” He turned away from Charles.

But Charles jumped onto the bandstand and grabbed Morgan’s shoulder. “Son, your mother had a heart attack. She’s dying.”

For a second, a horrible-terrible-Lord-please-forgive-me second, Morgan didn’t care. He looked around the stage and out at the full house. All those people waiting to hear Lady Ella, and he, Morgan Marshall, was going to play his trumpet with her. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to distinguish himself, not live under the shadow of his father, and possibly his only chance to join the Great Lady’s band. He ran a calloused finger over the initials MM etched around the mouthpiece on his trumpet. The engraving originally stood for Milton Marshall, but now it was for Morgan.

He gritted his teeth and pressed, released, and pressed his fingers along the trumpet keys. His throat constricted, and he willed frustrated tears not to appear.

“You going to be all right, son?” Charles gripped Morgan’s shoulder tighter, his eyes shining with sympathy and pity. If anyone knew what Morgan felt right now, it would be Charles. He was the one who’d brought the trumpet to Denver ten years ago, after Morgan’s dad died in Harlem — shot on stage when a fight broke out in the audience. Milton Marshall had been gaining notoriety with his brass in New York and sending money to Rose, Morgan’s mother, every week — until one day, it stopped. Instead, a Mr. Charles Xavier Lewis, saxophonist and best friend to Milton, showed up on their doorstep. He gave Rose the trumpet, but she threw it away, saying, “I always told Milton that he was playing the devil’s horn and one day the devil would collect his due.”

Morgan had fished the horn out of the trash and taught himself to play it. He was ten years old then and had been playing ever since. After all these years, he was finally going to be heard and acknowledged in his own right, and not only as Milton’s boy. People would know him, Morgan Marshall, the best damn jazz trumpeter coming out of Five Points.

A hard freeze of deep, unabiding shame iced his veins. Jesus, what’s wrong with me? All he could think about was himself. His big break, while his mom lay dying, could have already passed away, for all he knew. What kind of selfish son was he?

And yet... was his mom right? Had he been playing the devil’s horn and now the devil was coming to collect his due? But instead of coming for Morgan, the devil was going to take Rose?

No. Morgan wouldn’t allow himself to believe that ridiculous claptrap.

He looked out at the crowd one more time, absorbing the energy. He brought his gaze back to the stage. Miss Fitzgerald conversed with Henry at the piano. A soul-crushing envy squeezed his heart. “Yes, yes, of course, I need to go.”

He jumped down from the stage and shoved his way through the crowd. He glanced back over his shoulder. Miss Fitzgerald had taken hold of the mike and the crowd cheered. The opening rendition of “Dream a Little Dream of Me” filled the room, another trumpet taking the lead. Morgan clenched his jaw. Tommy.

Miss Fitzgerald crooned out the first few lines and her voice followed Morgan onto the street. A bustle of people loitered outside and still, he could hear that voice, and worst of all, the trumpet accompaniment. His fingers played along the keys on the horn in his hand. He closed his eyes for a moment and imagined he was on the stage right now. Right there beside Miss Fitzgerald, and she’d turn her head, giving him an encouraging smile as she sang her words.

The chill wind bit him. He shivered and opened his eyes. He’d forgotten his coat and trumpet case. But he refused to retrieve them. He didn’t want to see the Lady on stage and know he was that close to being up there with her. Instead, he headed south down Welton Street. The snowfall increased, and strands of Miss Fitzgerald’s haunting voice faded behind him.

He strode past the multitude of shops and businesses on Welton, most of them shuttered because the night belonged to the bars, nightclubs, and after-hours joints. Pedestrians flowed around Morgan, bundled up for the cold Colorado weather. Men sported camel coats and overcoats, women were clad in furs and tweed swing coats, and all wore hats from fancy to plain. Nobody paid attention to the forlorn, coatless young man clutching a trumpet.

Morgan reached the corner of Twenty-sixth and Welton. Across the street, a crowd of people stood in line at the entrance to the Rossonian Hotel. Mostly white folks, a lot of them venturing into the area to hear jazz and rub shoulders with the greats. They could afford the cover charge and were let in first. Louis Armstrong, a Five Points favorite, stayed there a few weeks back, and people couldn’t get enough. Morgan didn’t understand what the fuss was about him anyway. Morgan vowed he was going to be even bigger than Armstrong. And he could, if he joined Miss Fitzgerald’s band and made a name for himself.

A Ritz cab drove past, and Morgan let out a loud whistle, flagging it with his free hand. The cab slammed the brakes, sliding in the slush. Morgan jogged over, opened the back door, and jumped inside. To the cabbie, he said, “Denver General.” The vehicle continued south and took him to the hospital, where his mother lay waiting.

Morgan’s aunt pounced on him when he stormed through the hospital doors. She was dressed to the nines in a clingy satin dress. A mink stole from one of her many suitors dangled from her arm. Her makeup immaculate, her hair done up right, but the scowl on her face would have any of those men retreating right back out the door. “What took you so long?”

Morgan’s heart paused midtempo. Was he too late? “Did she—?”

“No.” Her annoyance softened. “They stabilized her, but it doesn’t look good.” She took his hand and led him to the ward where his mother rested.

An almost grayish hue tainted Rose’s light-skinned complexion. In the overbleached sheets and gray woolen blanket, she looked so tiny.

The hard soles of Morgan’s shoes made a dull echo on the disinfected linoleum floor. He took his mother’s hand in his. It looked washed out against his own darker skin. “Mom, I’m sorry. I’m here now.”

Footsteps approached. A doctor walked over and retrieved the clipboard hanging from Rose’s bed frame. He consulted the pages, then addressed Morgan and his aunt: “I’m Doctor Alwin, the physician in charge.”

“What happened to my mom?”

“She had a stroke, which led to temporary heart failure. The good news is, she’s going to make it.”

Relief crescendoed over Morgan like the triumphant end to an otherwise sad melody, while a cold bitterness roiled beneath. He could’ve played a song with Ella! The heat of reprehensible shame burned his face and neck.

The doctor continued: “But it’s going to be a painstaking recovery. She’s going to need long-term care.”

“What do you mean by long-term?”

“It all depends. It could be months, but sometimes it can take a year or more.”

“Years?” Morgan stood aghast.

“Not necessarily, but she will need to be moved to a nursing home so she can have around-the-clock care. We can recommend one that takes colored folks.”

A hard pit formed in Morgan’s stomach. He wouldn’t be able to afford that. But he needed to do something, otherwise his dream of traveling and playing jazz would disappear.

After the doctor left, Morgan turned to his aunt. “What are we going to do?”

She wrinkled her immaculate brows. “We?”

Stunned, Morgan stammered, “Well, yeah. We’re family. She’s your sister.”

“Now, you know I love your mom, but I’ve got my own life to live. I can’t be spending the rest of my days playing nursemaid to her.”

Indignation spiked. “Mom took care of you while you were little girls, after your own mother died.”

“That may be true, but I got a beauty shop to run and bills to pay.” She looked him up and down. “You’re a grown man. You can take care of your mama now.”

Morgan glanced around to see if anyone was listening. There was a nurse at the other end of the room, fluffing the pillows under another patient’s head. Morgan pitched his voice down a level. “I can’t afford to put Mom in a home. It’s going to cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.” He brought his voice even lower. “But the good news is, I’m about to make it big.”

His aunt laughed, sharp and loud. “You realize how many jazz players I know who swear they’re going to make it big?”

“I’m different. Miss Ella Fitzgerald asked me to join her band.” His lie held an overwhelming urgency. “I’ll have more than enough money to take care of Mom, and...” It was his turn to look her over. “...you, for that matter.”

“Boy, are you hearing yourself? You almost lost your mom tonight. You think you’re just going to run off and play your trumpet and leave me here to take care of everything?”

“I didn’t lose her, and now I gotta be able to make sure she’s taken care of. That takes money. Look, how else am I going to pay for it? I don’t make enough sweeping floors at Mallard’s Grocery. And I only make three dollars a night at Charles’s, which is the most any music joint pays in Five Points. But if I were in Ella Fitzgerald’s band, I’d have enough to pay for everything.” Not to mention, he’d be able to do the very thing he loved most... play jazz all day and night.

Beatrice harrumphed. “All right, say I help you out, but I can only do a few days, tops. I have a little bit tucked away, and Marlene can run the shop for me. You still need to get things set up with that home. And you’re going to have to pay me back.”

Morgan wrapped the woman in a bear hug. “Thank you, Aunt Bea. You’ll see. It’ll all work out.”

“You better hope so.” She draped her stole around her neck, then paused before turning to leave. “If I were you, I’d pray for a miracle.”

His aunt’s words played over in his mind. He did need a miracle, because there was no gig with Miss Fitzgerald. It could have happened though. He was sure as the shine gleaming off his brass. One time, Dizzy Gillespie heard B.C. Hobbs laying down chords on his sax, and the next thing you knew, B.C. had a train ticket to New York.

All Morgan needed was to get his opportunity back.

Folks would probably say he was being naïve, that he had plenty of time to do his thing. But life was short. His father’s early death and his mom’s stroke proved that. And when it came to making it in the music biz, you got one shot. Lose it and, well, the public would move on to the next cat who could blow. If he didn’t seize this now, he’d be stuck playing dives in Five Points for the rest of his life.

Morgan spent an unrestful, fretful night at his mother’s bedside. He left the hospital the next morning without bothering to go home. Instead, wearing the same but now wrinkled suit, he stood in front of the Revival Church on Stout Street. His mother’s church. Not the more popular Shorter AME Church, where according to his mother the women were snooty.

Trumpet still in hand, Morgan stared at the tall-steepled, white clapboard building he hadn’t stepped in since he was a teenager. For years, his mother harped on him about how he needed to have the Lord Jesus in his life. And if there was any time Morgan needed the ear of God, it was now. He went inside and took a seat in the back row.

Recognizing Morgan, Deacon Bennett, an elder of the church, slowly shuffled over. “Young man, we heard about your mother. So sorry.”

Morgan shook his hand. “Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.”

A few other members approached Morgan with their well wishes and prayers for Sister Marshall.

Morgan remembered how when he first pulled the trumpet from the trash, he would practice behind Rose’s back, while she was at work at the Deep Rock water facility, until one day she came home early and caught him. She beat his ass something good, though she conceded he was his daddy’s son and trumpet playing was in his blood. She said, “But you need to be careful and be willing to pay the price.”

Morgan was willing, all right, but the price would not be his mom. He had to make sure she got better. And because he didn’t subscribe to her superstitious nonsense, he would prove to her that he wasn’t playing the devil’s horn.

Pastor Green droned on with his sermon, but said one thing that caught Morgan’s attention: “...and let us remember what it says in James, chapter four, verse ten: Humble yourself before the Lord, and He will lift you up.”

Soon, the choir sang in joyful praise of the gospel, the congregation clapped with fervor, and the collection baskets made their way up and down the pews.

Pastor Green intoned, “Open your hearts and your wallets for the church’s fundraiser for a new roof. Come thee and help the Lord as the Lord has helped all of thee. Amen.”

The plate reached Morgan, and he rifled through his pockets, dropping in a dollar. The basket overflowed with coins and bills. Three more baskets circulated, then at the end, Deacon Bennett and another man poured them all into one large basket.

The church, Morgan thought, was not unlike a nightclub. Money coming in hand over fist.

That’s right! Charles wore tailored suits and lived in an expensive house. Cash flowed into the Silver Sax like the South Platte River into the Missouri River. Why didn’t he think of it before? Charles had helped their family from time to time, when Rose would accept it. Milton had been Charles’s best friend, and Charles said he felt a duty to look after Milton’s family.

Charles would help, of course he would.

And after Morgan hit the big time, he would pay Charles back... with interest.

Morgan staggered out of the church in desperate need of food and sleep. But he didn’t stop for either. He made a beeline to Charles’s. When he turned the corner at the end of California Street, the tension left him. Charles’s car was parked in front of his house. Morgan hurried up the walk and let himself in. Nobody locked their doors in the neighborhood.

Charles was sitting at his kitchen table, going over some paperwork. When he saw Morgan, he stood, putting a hand on Morgan’s shoulder. “You look like you haven’t been home. I’m mighty sorry for your loss, son.”

“Well, there’s good news. The doctors were able to save her.” Morgan set his horn on the table, bell down, and took a seat. He grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl and took a bite.

Charles returned to his seat. “That’s wonderful. I’m happy to hear it.”

“But the doctor isn’t sure if she’s going to fully recover.”

“Damn. I’m sorry. She’s a good woman.”

“But that’s not the worst of it. She’s going to need long-term care, and I can’t afford it right now.”

Charles shook his head, letting out a heavy sigh. “I want to help you, Morgan, but money is tight these days.”

Morgan leaned forward in his chair, the apple forgotten in his hand. “But what about the nightclub?” He hurried on: “And I’m not asking for charity. It’ll be a loan until I’m able to pay you back.”

“It’s not that, son. I know you would. But the Silver Sax has been losing money for months. I’m barely staying afloat.” He indicated the piles of papers on his table. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to keep paying the staff and keep the lights on.”

“How can that be? Music is booming in Five Points!”

“It was easier when I first opened the club. Now...” He shook his head, spreading his hands open. “I’m one of four dozen music joints here in The Points. The Rossonian is right at the center of it all. Can’t get in? Well, the 715 or Casino or Lil’s are only steps away. Famous and local jazz musicians all have their choice. Who wants to venture this far north on Welton to get to my place?”

“Miss Fitzgerald did.”

“She’s the exception. She likes to find the jewel in unexpected places. And bless her for it. Her agreeing to do a show tonight is going to help.”

Morgan rocked back in his chair. “She’s still here?”

Charles nodded, a weary but grateful grin on his face. “She’s going to put in a special performance before she leaves tomorrow.”

Adrenaline surged through Morgan. He sprang from his seat and began to pace. This was it. God was giving him a second chance.

Charles eyed him. “What is it?”

Morgan crouched by Charles. “Last night, you told me to show Miss Fitzgerald what I was made of, right?”

“Yeah, and she was sorry to hear about your mother.”

“And... if she’s using the house band again...” Morgan grabbed Charles by his upper arms. “Could I get another shot with her tonight?”

“You’re the house band’s trumpet player,” Charles responded uneasily.

Not for much longer! Morgan stopped in his tracks. He wouldn’t be able to leave with Miss Fitzgerald, even if she asked, though he was confident she would after she heard him play. First, he had to make sure his mom got the care she needed. The hospital wouldn’t throw her in the streets, but the nursing home would expect their money up front. Rose would need to be moved soon, much sooner than Morgan would be ready to pay, playing in Miss Fitzgerald’s band or not.

Money pouring into that basket at the Revival rose in his mind, and a smile spread across his face. What did they do with the collection money until the bank opened the next day? Hid it in the church until morning.

His aunt had said he needed a miracle, and his mom always told him that God helped those who helped themselves. Okay, she didn’t mean it like this, but he would pay it back. He would send a large anonymous donation, ten times what he took.

Morgan let go of Charles’s arms. He picked up his horn and strode to the front door, proclaiming over his shoulder, “Great, I’m going to be there tonight to play that song!”

Morgan went home to shower and shave. He had the perfect plan. He’d wait until dark, “borrow” the money from the church, and give it Charles for Rose’s care. Then he’d impress the hell out of Miss Fitzgerald and be on his way to fame and fortune.

Easy-peasy.

Getting in the Revival’s back office was simple enough. Prying open the metal filing cabinet with the fireplace poker sitting beside the tiny room’s stone hearth wasn’t difficult. Using a screwdriver he’d stuffed in his pocket to snap off the flimsy lock on the heavy, ornate wooden box? Piece of cake.

As Morgan opened the lid, an exalted breath escaped his lips. Dozens of bills in stacked bundles lined the box.

“Morgan? Is that you, son?” Deacon Bennett stood in the open doorway, a flashlight in one hand. “What are you doing?”

Morgan slammed down the lid and held the box possessively to his chest.

Deacon Bennett shook his head. “You don’t need to do this, the Lord—”

What did the deacon know about what Morgan needed?

Morgan moved, intending to pass the old man, but Deacon Bennett had set his flashlight down. He tried to grab the box from Morgan’s tight grip. They struggled until Morgan wrenched the box away, swinging it at the deacon. The box hit the side of the man’s head, the money spilling out. Deacon Bennett stumbled back four jerky steps before going down. The back of his head slammed into the edge of the stone hearth like an accent note in a discordant harmony.

Morgan’s heart paused for several painful beats, then became a sustained, steady vibration against his rib cage. Helpless in his terror and unsure what to do, he knelt beside Deacon Bennett and took his wrist, feeling a faint pulse.

He should get help. But he needed this money.

His vision blurred as he saw blood seep toward the scattered dollar bills. His fingers trembled when he reached over the deacon’s motionless body to collect them. Only when a single tear dripped from his cheek did he realize he was crying.

Sitting back on his haunches, Morgan wept as if exhausted from a burden he’d been carrying since he was ten years old. He wept the tears that he couldn’t when his father died — his mother admonishing, “Your daddy paid the price by playing that damn horn.” He wept the tears that he should’ve when he thought his mother was dying. Full of resentment and rage for missing his moment with Ella Fitzgerald.

Morgan pulled out his yellow silk handkerchief, this time to wipe his tears. He stuffed the bills in his pockets. He knew he should try to do something for Deacon Bennett, but he couldn’t. If Morgan went to jail, how would that help anyone?

He took the old man’s wrist again — and this time, he felt nothing.

Morgan rose on unsteady legs. All he could do now was make it big and use the money he earned to pay back all his misdeeds. He’d send donations to the church, as well as to Deacon Bennett’s wife. He’d also send money to Charles to ensure Rose got her proper care.

Praying no one saw him, he snuck out the back of the church and took the long way down to the music district. Using side streets and avoiding people. He needed to pull himself together so Charles wouldn’t suspect anything.

Morgan walked through the back door of the Silver Sax. It would be another thirty minutes before the place officially opened. He found Charles in the back office and hoped he’d erased the horror of what he’d done from his face. Hoped that Charles would think the red eyes and haggard expression were from grief and lack of sleep.

He emptied his pockets, dumping the money on the desk. It was close to five hundred dollars. Morgan had stopped to count it in a deserted alley. “Can you make sure my mom is taken care of while I’m gone? I’ll send more.”

Charles looked at the crumpled bills piled on his desk. “Where are you going, and where did you get the money?”

Morgan decided to not answer the first question and went to the one he’d prepared a lie for: “Playing the dogs at the Mile High. It was my lucky day.”

Charles raised an eyebrow.

“Look, I played everything I had and won. God is looking out for me. He knows I want to play jazz and travel, and He put that opportunity in front of me two times. What else could it be but destiny? And... well, I...” Deacon Bennett lying on that cold church floor appeared in his mind. “Well, God helped me out and let me score that money.”

The skepticism left Charles’s face, replaced by a broad grin. “It sure does seem like God is looking out for you. Ella is definitely in need of a new trumpeter.”

Anxiety seared Morgan where exultation should have resided. Everything he did led him to this moment, this victory. Instead, nausea threatened him, and he shuddered to keep it at bay.

Charles studied him, brow furrowed. No doubt he expected Morgan to be ecstatic about the news, so Morgan obliged. He slapped the palms of his hands together. “Hot damn! You see what I’m saying. It’s destiny, baby!”

Charles laughed. “That it is.” He gathered up the money and locked it in his office safe. “I’ll make sure your mother gets the care she needs. The club is going to be in the black after tonight.”

And it was true. The Silver Sax had a full house. The fullest Morgan had ever seen it. This was the night dreams were made of.

The First Lady of Song arrived in all her elegance and splendor, wearing a blue metallic brocade gown. She expressed joy about his mother’s expected recovery. Morgan, subdued and contrite, expressed his gratitude for her compassion and generosity.

Ray and the rest of the fellows waited on stage. All wearing their best suits and ties, and all clean-shaven and shoes spit shined. When Morgan joined them, they each gave him their solemn well wishes for his mom’s recovery. But the occasion was too momentous to keep their excitement in check for long. Morgan couldn’t blame them. If it were under any other circumstance, he would be crowing the loudest right now.

Charles walked on stage so he could introduce the Sax’s special guest himself. All the fellows grinned as they took their places. Morgan moved beside Ray, who said, “You okay, kid?”

Morgan nodded. His finger rubbed the initials on his horn.

Charles finished his intro for Miss Fitzgerald and she took the stage. The crowd erupted in a cacophony of applause. Morgan wondered if it was like this for her every night, and if one ever got used to it.

As the crowd’s adoration started to fade, Ella turned to Morgan and smiled an invitation for him to begin. He inhaled deeply and pressed his lips, buzzing into the trumpet the opening notes to “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”

The fellows joined in. Ella did her trademark scat, then sung those lovely words. Her soothing voice made Morgan forget about the wretched things he’d done, all in the name of chasing a dream and being a dutiful son. The music was a balm to his troubled soul.

To play the sweet, sweet music was all he ever wanted.

Morgan closed his eyes. Ella’s voice and his horn were the only things that mattered. Not Deacon Bennett, not Charles, not his mother, and possibly not even his father.

As they reached the song’s final chords, he opened his eyes.

Two uniformed officers moved through the crowd. No one seemed to notice, so fixated were they on Ella. The cops’ attention never wavered from the stage, but it wasn’t the Queen of Jazz they were interested in. They only had eyes for Morgan, would-be legendary jazz trumpeter straight out of Five Points.

The song ended, and the crowd was on its feet. Ella’s smile was radiant, and she bowed, then turned to present Morgan.

Yes, he probably would have gotten that coveted invitation. But he wouldn’t be leaving Denver tomorrow. And it wasn’t his destiny to play in the great Miss Ella Fitzgerald’s band.

He had it all wrong.

God didn’t put the idea of stealing the church money in front of him. It was the devil, and like his mom told him, the devil always collected his due.

On Grasmere Lake by Mathangi Subramanian

Washington Park

The day they found her father’s body, Nithi’s feet moved on their own, carrying her out of her front door and down Louisiana Avenue, toward Washington Park. It was winter, and pale, leafless maple and oak trees twisted toward the sky like bleached bones. Renovated homes alternated with cleared plots of land, the houseless dirt turned up like freshly dug graves.

It’s over, Nithi told herself, it’s all over now. She waited to feel relief, but all she felt was the wind, cold and fierce and lifeless, beating against her cheeks.

Nithi lived with her mother, Priya, in a bungalow on Clayton Street that Priya inherited from her parents. Priya’s mother had died of breast cancer when Priya was in elementary school. Her father had died of a heart attack when Priya was nineteen, just days after she told him she was pregnant with Nithi.

“I dream about him,” Priya told Nithi. “He sits on my bed, we talk. He still smells piney, like his favorite aftershave. It’s so... comforting. So real.”

Nithi’s dead father, Jason, visited her dreams too, though his presence was anything but comforting. His form shifted and blinked, as though what was left of his body couldn’t get a proper grip on the atmosphere. Waves of fury radiated off him, shimmering hotly. He never spoke to Nithi. He just watched her, his pinprick pupils inky black, his irises blue as broken glass.

Were his eyes blue when he was alive? Nithi couldn’t remember. All she remembered was the way hatred spewed out of him like lava, the way his fists cratered the walls of their home, turning it into a foreign planet, a landscape unable to sustain human life.

At Grasmere Lake, Nithi collapsed onto her favorite bench by the dirt path that led to the lawn bowling club, and faced the frozen water. A flock of Canada geese slid across the frozen surface of the lake. A few of them broke away from the group and rose, honking, beating their long, sharp wings against the frigid air. Their choked voices cut a silver path through the corpse-gray sky.

Nithi tucked her down jacket tightly around her legs. Not that it made a difference: on the walk over, her body had grown too numb to feel anything, even the frosty air. Her phone buzzed in her pocket.

“Are you okay?” Priya asked.

“Yes,” Nithi lied. How many times in her life had her mother asked if she was okay? How many times had Nithi said yes, when she really meant no?

“Don’t worry, kanna,” Priya said. “Farah Aunty’s the detective on the case.”

Farah Aunty was Priya’s mother’s best friend. They had gone to South High together. This is good, Nithi told herself. Farah Aunty’s smart. She’ll take care of this.

Nithi clutched the phone to her ear and whispered, “Amma, I can’t lose you.”

“No one’s losing anyone,” Priya said steadily.

Nithi wanted to believe her. But after everything that had happened, it was hard to remember what hope felt like.

In high school, Nithi would study her reflection in the mirror, searching for traces of her father. Jason was white, his hair blond and thinning. There was something wan and discolored about him, as though he were already half-dead. Nithi’s skin, on the other hand, was dark brown, her hair thick and black, like her Tamil American mother’s. When Nithi found no evidence of Jason in her high cheekbones, her snub nose — all inherited from Priya — her shoulders would sag with relief.

Her first year at Community College of Denver, Nithi took a course called “Human Services for Families.” In one unit, they discussed domestic violence. The required reading felt like a time line of Nithi’s parents’ lives. Survivors of abuse, the text said, tended to start dating their spouses young (Priya and Jason met in high school), to have little family support (Jason was in and out of foster care; after her father’s death, Priya was an orphan), and to have a limited social network (as far as Nithi knew, Farah Aunty was Priya’s only friend).

Abusers, the text said, often had histories of trauma. Jason never talked to Nithi much about his childhood — he never talked to Nithi much at all — so she couldn’t confirm this. But when she read about abusers’ lack of employment, their heavy alcohol and drug use, their history of depression, she thought of her father coming home at the end of the day, his time unaccounted for, his collar reeking of smoke and cheap beer, his eyes bloodshot and bagged.

Nithi shuddered, remembering those evenings. She would do her homework, Priya would return from her nursing shift at Rose Medical. The two of them would make dinner together, cheerfully gossiping about Priya’s colleagues and Nithi’s classmates, amiably arguing about how much was too much salt. Then Jason would arrive, and the air around them would congeal. In her nervousness, Nithi would grow clumsy, dropping vegetable peels on the floor or nicking herself with a knife. Jason would swoop down on her like a raptor, berating her for making a mess, for not being able to do anything right. The pressure cooker would shriek and he would yell about the noise, tell Priya to learn to cook something besides her damn foreign food. The women crept around him, trying to erase themselves, or, if they stayed visible, to be Jason’s idea of perfect. But it was no use. Whatever they did, it was never enough. He was always angry. They were always wrong.

“We can’t keep living like this, Amma,” Nithi would say. “We have to leave.”

“We will,” Priya promised. But the years passed, and they stayed, and they stayed, and they stayed.

Despite the cold, the park was crowded. A pack of blond women in athleisure gear circled the lake, clutching coffee cups in their leather-gloved hands. A young Latinx couple walked their Pomeranian down the hill from South Franklin Street. The tiny creature darted, startling a family of ducks. Nithi breathed deeply, trying to leash her spasming heart.

Nithi heard footsteps on the dead grass. In a minute, she saw that they belonged to a brown-skinned woman wearing a long green peacoat. The stranger stopped to watch the sunshine bounce off the lake, and then settled on the bench next to Nithi. Nithi turned away from her, hoping she would understand Nithi was not in the mood to talk. But if the woman saw the gesture, she ignored it.

“It’s not so bad in the sun, is it?” the stranger asked. She smelled like mothballs and talcum powder, like an antique store. “I love this lake, but the lake at the north end of the park, Smith Lake, is my favorite. You know it used to be a beach? In my mother’s time, people swam there. Well, she didn’t. Black people weren’t allowed. People like my mother. People like you and me.”

Nithi raised an eyebrow, wondering if she should correct her. Nithi’s skin was dark enough that she was often mistaken for Black, especially in Denver, where every person of color was assumed to be either Black or Latinx.

The woman continued, “My mother and her friends protested here once. The police came, and they beat them.” Nithi stared into the woman’s eyes. They were lighter than Nithi’s, almost golden. “That’s what men do, isn’t it? They hurt us. Especially when we fight back.”

Nithi thought of the sound of her father’s fist in her mother’s stomach, his open palm on her mother’s face. For the first time all morning, she shivered.

In her dreams, Nithi spoke to her father, but he never replied.

“I’m not afraid of you anymore,” she said, wondering if the dead believed the lies of the living.

Other nights, she asked, “Why did you hate us so much?” What she really wanted to ask was, “Why did you hate me so much?”

Still other nights, she chanted, “You can’t hurt us now, you can’t hurt us now, you can’t hurt us now.” Repeated it like a mantra, her body rocking back and forth until she exhausted herself, falling out of the dream and into a viscous, colorless sleep. Nothingness covered her like a weighted blanket, heavy and black and impenetrable.

It wasn’t pleasant, dreaming of her dad, but it was an improvement over her usual nightmares. Before Jason died, Nithi’s nights were plagued by nightmares of escaping her home with her mother, only to find her father following, hunting them like prey.

“He didn’t used to be like this,” Priya said sometimes. “For our second wedding anniversary, he surprised me with a home-cooked meal — baked macaroni and a salad. We ate it after you fell asleep. Some nights, he brought home flowers for no reason. In the fall he brought black-eyed Susans, my favorite. In the spring he’d bring home lilacs. His favorite.”

Nithi tried to imagine this man who pulled casseroles out of ovens, who knew the name of a flower whose blossoms felt like crushed velvet. She remembered nothing gentle about her father, nothing redeemable. Any kindness he had shown Nithi or her mother belonged to a history only Priya had known.

The ice on Grasmere Lake was lined with frost. Slowly, the sun’s strengthening heat bore down on it, fissuring its weakest parts. When it finally cracked, it sounded like breaking bones.

Nithi studied the woman on the bench. A pattern of bruises bloomed across her cheekbones, circled her neck. A raised scar mountained her face from her temple to her jaw. It reminded Nithi of the way Priya looked in the mornings, before she put on her makeup, her dupattas, her infinity scarves.

“Are you okay?” Nithi asked the woman.

“Oh, all this?” she asked, waving at her face with a gloved hand. “I’ll be fine.”

“Do you need help?” Nithi asked. “I could help.”

But could she? When Nithi graduated from high school, she got into Grinnell, her dream school. Instead of leaving the state, she registered for Community College of Denver. She said it was to save money, but really, it was because she was afraid that if she left Priya at home alone with her father, Jason would eventually kill her.

Instead of protecting Priya, Nithi’s decision made things worse. Her father cursed Nithi for staying home, for not getting a real job, even though, as far as she knew, Jason didn’t have one either. To appease him, Nithi took an early morning shift at the Whole Foods off the highway. Jason blamed Nithi’s lack of ambition on Priya’s parenting, her bad genes, her inability to be a role model. The beatings started earlier, and they lasted longer. Until he died.

Or, more accurately, until he was murdered.

This was why Nithi still feared her father. Why, when he came to her in dreams, insubstantial, furious, she shrank from him. Because she knew that the circumstances of her father’s death could destroy her. That his violence was larger than the grave.

“Are you okay?” the stranger asked. She pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to Nithi. It was only then that Nithi felt tears sliding down her face, freezing on her chin.

“No,” Nithi whispered, taking the handkerchief and wiping her eyes. It smelled fresh, like it had been dried in the sun. “I did something terrible, and now someone else is going to pay for it.”

“Oh, now,” the woman said kindly, “you seem like a nice girl. How bad could it really be?”

“Bad,” Nithi said, her body heaving with panic. “Really bad.”

“Huh,” the woman said. All around them, dead cattails rustled, their bodies stiff and broken. “Why’d you do it?”

“I don’t know,” Nithi said. “I was just so angry, you know? So mad.”

“There, there,” the woman said, patting the sleeve of Nithi’s down coat. Her hand felt insubstantial, like a gust of wind. “It’ll be okay. You’ll see.”

Nithi nodded dumbly, avoiding the stranger’s incandescent eyes.

Three months ago, Nithi took an evening shift at Whole Foods. Their family needed the money — Rose Medical had cut down Priya’s hours, and although Nithi’s father claimed he had a job in construction, whatever he made, he didn’t share. The extra shift meant Nithi wouldn’t be home until after dinner, when her father’s violence was always at its worst.

“I’ll be fine,” Priya had said. “Don’t worry.”

Nithi had told herself all kinds of lies about the consequences of her absence. It’s not like being there stops him, she reasoned. In the past, Nithi had tried prying Jason off of Priya, but her father was strong, and he would send Nithi ricocheting across the room. Once Nithi had called the police, but they took forever to respond. By the time they got there, the fight was over, and her father had driven away. The police hadn’t believed Nithi and Priya’s story, and even if they had, they said that there was nothing they could do. One of the officers — a woman — handed Priya a business card.

“In case you want to see about a restraining order,” the woman said.

As they walked away, the male officer asked, “Why’d you do that? You know they never call.”

The female officer shrugged and said, “One day one of them might.”

In her human services course, Nithi read that survivors of domestic abuse are most vulnerable when they leave. Leaving, Nithi read, sent abusers into the blindest, most murderous rages, rages that got victims killed. It was, in short, next to impossible. The only choice was to stay where you were and to try to survive.

“Here, take this,” the stranger said, reaching into her coat pocket. She pulled out a heart-shaped locket, the kind Nithi sometimes saw in old movies, or in the vintage stores on Colfax. When the stranger held it up, the silvery metal caught the sun and tossed the light around the park, glittering on the lake’s petaled ice, the lawn’s melting snow.

“It’s beautiful,” Nithi said. She reached for the necklace and clutched it into her palm. The metal was so cold that she could feel it through her gloves. “But I can’t take this. It’s too nice.”

“It’s good luck,” the woman said. “You need it more than I do.”

Before Nithi could protest, the stranger stood up and walked away.

The night her father died, Nithi drove home from Whole Foods, her neck tingling, her arms riddled with goose bumps. She tore through the empty streets, far above the speed limit, some force she couldn’t describe pulling her to her mother, churning her stomach with dread.

She was right to be afraid. When she walked through the door, her father had her mother up against the wall, his hands clutching her throat. Priya’s skin was tinged with blue, her eyes popping from her head. It was, Nithi was sure, the last moments of her mother’s life.

The locket caught Nithi’s reflection, stretched it into a distorted version of her face. It was like staring at a stranger. Her phone buzzed, breaking the spell.

“Mom?” Nithi said. “Are you okay? What’s going on?”

“So you remember that robbery gone bad? The one on Elizabeth Street?” Priya asked.

“Yeah,” Nithi replied cautiously. A man had broken into a house and tried to steal some antique jewelry, some electronics. He’d been caught in the act: the owner came home halfway through. The thief ended up killing her — a woman, Nithi thought, although she wasn’t sure why she remembered that. Farah Aunty was investigating the case. She had told them about it one night over dinner, a few days before Jason died.

“Well, Farah says that your father was responsible for it.” Priya’s voice was heavy with — something. Was it exhaustion or relief? Maybe both, Nithi thought.

“So what does that mean?” Nithi asked.

“It means they’re not going to look into who murdered your father,” Priya said. “At least, not right away. See, the DNA match means that Farah just closed a case — and a really prominent one too — so there’s no pressure on her to open a new one. Not until they do the paperwork and trial and everything — which, Farah says, could take awhile. So long that they probably won’t be able to do a thorough investigation of your father’s death. When you wait that long, apparently, the leads go cold.”

“Did he do it, though?” Nithi whispered. “Did he kill that woman?”

“He’s charged with a crime, kanna,” Priya said. “Does it matter which one?”

Nithi watched the ducks dip their heads into the lake, their tails pointing toward the sky, their bright orange legs pedaling frantically, keeping them afloat. She slumped on the bench, spent. Memories warmed her icy blood.

The night her father died, the night she’d seen her mother up against the wall, seconds from death, Nithi felt herself rise out of her body, as though she were watching the scene from the ceiling. She watched herself snatch the cast-iron frying pan, the one they used to make dosas. She watched herself charge her father. And then she watched herself pummel him, over and over, on his head, his neck, his face. She watched herself smash his skull, his nose, his rib cage. Long after he lay on the ground, bloody and lifeless, she kept beating him, beating him, beating him. Her vision was clouded with a red fog, and her bones clattered with a clotting, crimson rage.

When it was over, she returned to her body, her senses sharp as a wild animal’s. She felt the heft of the skillet in her hand. Smelled the coppery tang of bloodied metal. Heard her mother gasping, her damaged windpipe desperate for oxygen.

Nithi rushed to her mother’s side. “Are you okay?” She wept. And then she repeated, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry.”

Her mother, broken and near death, stroked Nithi’s hair, kissed the top of her head, and croaked, “Call Farah.”

And then, when Nithi fished her cell phone out of her pocket, Priya said, “Tell her I killed him.”

“What?” Nithi said, the phone already pressed against her ear.

“You heard me. Tell her it was me.”

Farah must’ve been the one to take the body to the empty old house on Josephine Street. The one that, when they demolished it, turned up Jason’s corpse. In the crime scene pictures, the bulldozer was still there, its steel jaw poised above the pile of bricks, its neck stretched like a viper. Nithi’s father’s broken hand stuck up through the dirt, stiff and ghostly and still.

No investigation, Nithi thought. No opportunity for her mother to turn herself in. No reason for Nithi to hate herself, first for being a murderer, and then for letting her mother take the blame. It’s all okay now, Nithi told herself. It’s all okay.

She held the necklace up to the sun. It twisted like a pendulum on its chain. The stranger was right — it really was good luck. Nithi saw now that the locket was encrusted with jewels — red, green, blue. She watched them glimmer against the surging clouds, spiral in the sudden wind.

“Oh my god!”

A woman ran toward Nithi, eyes bloodshot, face bare. She looked so much like Nithi — the same coloring, the same curly dark hair. But also the same look of desperation, of sleeplessness. Of being haunted.

“You found it!” the woman said.

“This?” Nithi asked.

“Yes!” Gently, the woman removed the locket from Nithi’s hand and opened it. On one side was a picture of the stranger Nithi had spoken to a few minutes earlier. And on the other was the face of this woman, the one who was talking to her now.

“It’s yours?” Nithi asked, bewildered.

“It was my grandmother’s. I thought we lost it,” the woman said, her voice breaking. She cradled the necklace. “Of course it was here. This was her favorite bench. She must have dropped it the last time she came here.”

“Was her favorite bench?”

“She passed away. Three months ago,” the woman said. Her pupils reflected the geese and the ducks, the lake and the trees, the snow and the ice. The whole park was trapped, there, in the rings of her eyes. “There was a robbery. You probably heard about it? The guy took a bunch of my grandmother’s jewelry. I thought they’d taken this too. Really, it means so much to me that you found it. And to think it happened just as I was passing by! What luck.”

“What luck,” Nithi repeated.

“Thank you,” the woman said, clutching Nithi’s arms through her coat. “Really, thank you.”

“Where did you say your grandmother lived?” Nithi asked.

“Elizabeth Street,” the woman said. When she walked away, it looked like she was being swallowed up by the sky.

El Armero by Mario Acevedo

Globeville

I exit the number 12 bus at the corner of Forty-fifth Avenue and Camino de Frida Kahlo. Traffic rumbles above me. I’m under the Mousetrap, an immense concrete confusion straddling Globeville, where Interstates 25 and 70 intersect north of downtown Denver. I take a moment to catch my breath. The air carries a metallic tang and tastes of grit filtering from the rush of trucks and cars on the overpass.

My path is blocked by yellow tape and a battered metal placard: Detour Desvío. Tire marks from construction equipment crisscross the sidewalk. To my left extends an immense pit where the highway will be broadened. Es el año de Nuestro Señor 2027, and time for the politicians to pay back favors by diverting public money into more “infrastructure.”

I take note of the arrangement of square holes beneath the overpass where the footings for a new foundation will be poured. My gaze continues to the existing interchange. Street legend has it a lot of problems were solved when that part of the highway was built. Snitches and witnesses disappeared, buried beneath thick layers of concrete.

I shrug. Not my concern what happened. Nor what might happen.

In that mysterious way that rumors circulate through the barrio, I got word that Toro needs me, which is why I’m here. I want to hope I know why he summons me, but I know I’m wrong.

I amble north, taking it easy. If I walk too fast, the left side of my chest hitches, constricting my breath.

I pass the parking lot where bolillos queue up to take advantage of today’s specials at Sweet Buds Cannabis. Round the corner, cars, pickups, bums on bicycles wait their turn at the take-out window of Pato’s Liquor Drive-Thru. While the weed store looks as neat and slick as a Starbucks, Pato’s is a cinder-block shack flanked by walls of particle board, the surfaces coated by flaking house paint and tattered posters advertising cheap beer and whiskey. There’s little in my surroundings that isn’t tagged with graffiti. The posts of streetlamps litter the sidewalk like fallen timbers, mowed down by bad drivers.

Across the street stands the city’s latest attempt at solving the area’s crime problem. An electronic billboard cycles through a red X canceling a pistol, bullets transforming into doves, and the message: Stop the shooting! Love one another! The mayor says this billboard is a peace memorial to the victims of gun violence. She calls it “a compelling symbol of hope triumphing over despair, of virtue over lawlessness.”

But ask me and I’ll tell you we have enough symbols.

Every time it rains, this stretch of real estate, from here to Elyria-Swansea, floods like a motherfucker, the way it’s done for years, but the government never gets around to fixing that mess. Dolores Huerta Vocational closed due to lack of funding, which cut short both my GED studies and my chance for a certificate in applied electronics. Drug abatement and rehab counseling also got axed. Fiscal restraint and all that. Yet City Hall managed to cough up two and a half million dollars to shower on the media relations firm that designed this “symbol.”

If you want more irony, here’s some: The local gangster wannabes use the billboard for target practice, and the more brazen they are about it, the better to gain street cred. One chica — all preggers — was strolling past when she got clipped by a ricochet. She not only lost the baby, she wears a colostomy bag for life. Talk about bad luck, ese. So the word around here is, don’t get close to the Peace Memorial or you might get popped by a stray bala.

So why stick around?

Because you can run away to another town but as long as you live among raza, you’ll end up in yet another barrio. Go a thousand miles, it’s really just like you only got up on the other side of bed. The view is a little different but your situation hasn’t changed.

For sure, one way out is the military. Because of the war against terror, which never ends, and a lack of volunteers, the army dropped its recruitment standards so low even someone as rasquache as me is eligible (that is, prestabbing). Uncle Sam dangles all the bennies: steady pay, enlistment bonuses, job training, mierda, mierda, mierda. Of the eight vatos I know personally who signed up, four never returned — meaning they found new lives somewhere else; two did come back in coffins, and one came back covered in burn scars and missing most of the top of his head. That’s Tomas Sada — we used to call him Guapo. You’ll see him out shambling about in his walker, drooling and pissing all over himself.

Then there’s Marco Paz, a drone technician who came back from the Air Force strung out on Modafinix (weapons-grade Adderall that jazzed his brain to work at computer speed) until the morning he stretched his neck across the track of the J-Line light rail. When the cops showed up, they had to chase away the raccoons playing tug-of-war with his severed head. That’s the image I think about every Veterans Day.

This afternoon I keep walking past St. Joseph Polish Catholic Church. Hard to believe the neighborhood was once home to Poles, Russians, and Slavs. Then the Italians came, followed by us gente. Actually, we were always here, but back then we didn’t count.

Funny name for a place, Globeville. This misshapen plot of land abuts the South Platte River (what Mark Twain once called a “yellow trickle”) and was named after a smelter. I wipe my nose, mindful of all the crap the government keeps finding in the soil. Cadmium, zinc, arsenic, lead. Don’t eat from vegetable gardens. If the air smells bad, don’t go outside. Don’t play in standing water.

Arriving at Reies López Tijerina Acres (aka subsidized housing), I climb the outside stairs, slowly, to the third floor. The punteros on lookout give me the nod.

Toro answers his door on the second knock. His craggy face looms over me, and he glances to the tool bag in my hand. “Éntrale, Rafael.”

Thick kohl sets off Toro’s eyes, the color of rusted steel. The electro-ink on his thick neck dances like snakes on fire. A tank top drapes his broad chest and shows off biceps each as big and square as the business ends of sledgehammers. Gym shorts ride up on hairy thighs so muscular they seem powerful enough to bulldoze through a police roadblock. His massive, scarred hands are matching résumés of every beat-down he’s given. Toro couldn’t be more intimidating if he had horns growing out of his head.

But he’s got his charms. I should know, me and him had a thing going for a while. Sometimes my vieja at the time, Delia, would join us. She and I used to watch Toro snooze after we’d worn him out, the tats on his wide back writhing and smoldering as they faded from neon yellow to a cool aqua color. Delia totally freaked out in a good way and she got herself inked up too. But then she overdid it like she does everything else, so balling her became like fucking one of those anime sex robots you can rent on Colfax.

Domestic Intervention Services peed their polyester pants in happiness when Toro came out about being bi (who isn’t these days?), thinking that would put him in touch with his feminine side. They also loved that he bleached his hair and dyed it bright pink.

Toro lays a big paw on my shoulder and the old feelings soak through me. My knees threaten to give and as I think about falling, I want to drag him on top of me. I pretend to believe that I’m wrong about how he feels about me. I pretend to believe that things between him and me can go back to the way they used to be.

“Un cafecito, hermano?” He steps back to let me pass. “Pan dulce?”

Hermano. Sigh. I used to be his pan dulce.

The disappointment stings, but I hide the pain behind a smile. “Gracias. Después.” A snack can wait, as I don’t want to dribble coffee and crumbs all over my work.

Toro leads me through the cramped living room to the kitchen table. I pause once to catch my breath. The stairs about wore me out. Last year I got stabbed by Levon Spencer. No reason to carry a grudge though, Levon mistook me for Antonio Lopez — all us greasers look alike. I get it. Besides, Levon OD’d a couple of weeks later, so according to the school counselor, it’s best to forgive and forget.

Always look for the blessing, right, ese? The blessing here is that stabbing, the collapsed lung, and the resulting breathing problems downgraded my health mobility profile to a 2B, meaning no hard physical labor, and so my name is automatically deleted from lists when jales for roofer and warehouse technician circulate through Community Force Placement. Thanks to the injury, the toughest gigs I used to get were as a flagman at construction cone zones, but the robots have taken those jobs like they have most everything else. Though they’ve yet to make a robot that can do what I’m here to do for Toro.

In the living room, throw pillows decorated with la Virgen and copies of noir movie posters are scattered over a sofa cocooned in clear plastic. A cumbia murmurs from a speaker alongside unlit votive candles on a spice rack. A calendar for Jimenez Tortillas hangs on the wall. Through the sliding glass door I scope out the narrow balcony where an ashtray sits in the center of a small patio table. Toro seems alone.

“¿Y tu tía?” I ask.

“Comprando sus frajos en el 7-Eleven.” He opens the kitchen blinds to let in more light. I set my tool bag on the table and hang my backpack on a chair. I pull out the chair and sit. After I zip open my satchel of tools, I arrange what I’ll need on a square of repurposed yoga mat.

As I do this, Toro digs into my backpack, curious, suspicious as ever. He stacks the books I carried onto the table: Remains of the Day. Paisaje de otoño. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He fingers the book spines. “These any good?”

“I like them.”

He grunts in approval. “Me cae que estudias. No como esos grifos que caminan en nuestras calles. We need more bookworms and fewer junkies.”

From under the table, Toro retrieves a large canvas tote that he places in front of me. It’s an RF-blocking bag. Inside I count five heaters — three 9mms, a .380, and a .38 Super. The bag smothers any tracking signals from the “smart” guns inside.

Toro makes his bones in this neighborhood as el sicario número uno. You need to settle a score or send a message, who you gonna call? Since violence is his stock in trade, he makes extra cash fencing guns and ammo.

Returning to the bag, with a signal detector (that I stole from my last day at Huerta) I check for an active GPS transmitter. I figure the guns have been in the bag some time, as the batteries are all run down.

“Can you do this one?” Toro handles a really nice PW-Pro 9mm stamped SFPD. “But I don’t want you to fuck it up.”

“Time me,” I boast.

He sets the stopwatch on his phone.

I steady the PW-Pro in my left hand. “Go.” With a portable drill I bore a small hole in the back of the frame to puncture the embedded microprocessor, which lobotomizes the gun.

Smart guns are designed to lock up without the necessary permission code — supplied by a special ring, or a matching smart watch, a fingerprint reader, some caca like that. But there’s gotta be a way to disassemble the gun in case things need fixing. I center a brass punch over the take-down pin in the slide, give a couple of taps with my plastic mallet, the pin falls out, and the slide... well, it slides off.

I disable the locking solenoid with liquid weld. In another minute, the grip panels are off and the frame lies bare on the yoga mat. More taps with the brass punch and mallet, some twisting with needle-nose pliers, the electronic interface between the firing mechanism and the trigger falls loose, and this PW-Pro is as high-tech as my abuelita’s cast-iron comal.

After fitting a small length of coat-hanger wire to replace the interface linkage, I reinstall the grip panels. I put the slide back on and rack it. Clack. Pull the trigger. Click. I repeatedly work the slide and pull the trigger — clack, click, clack, click — and every time, the trigger snaps crisp as it should.

“Listo,” I blurt out.

Toro announces, “Four minutes, thirty-three seconds.” He grabs the PW-Pro from me. As he examines the pistol, I take a workman’s pride in my craft, regardless of what consequences it brings to the community. I, a high school dropout, in less than five minutes, have outsmarted a gaggle of white-bread Silicon Valley engineers and their million-dollar solution to the epidemic of gun violence. It’s a misdemeanor to alter a smart gun and a felony to show anyone how to do it. But just go to the dark web and you can find all kinds of tutorials for things you shouldn’t do.

“Algo más.” I pick up a nail file. “I have to alter the firing pin.”

Toro lifts an eyebrow.

I explain: “The end of the firing pin is engraved with a code to trace the gun by imprinting the ammo it shoots. A quick swipe with the file and no more code.”

Toro squints down the sights. “Maybe I want the code. Let the world know que una arma de los marranos fue que mordió un soplón.”

It’s not my concern what he does with the gun, but in this case, a snitch is gonna learn what happens when you cozy up to the law.

Toro loads the magazine with a couple of 9mm rounds he fishes from a pocket in his shorts, fits the magazine into the PW-Pro, and racks the slide. An icy chill freezes my nerves. What the hell is he doing?

He steps to the audio player and turns up the volume till it rattles the windows. Aiming the pistol at some books on a shelf, he fires lengthwise through the stack. Despite the loud music, the blast spanks my ears. The empty casing whirls toward me, bounces off the table, and rolls to the floor. The gun worked flawlessly.

He lowers the volume and, on the PW-Pro, thumbs the magazine release. The empty mag falls into his left hand. He cycles the pistol slide, catching the remaining cartridge as it flings out the ejection port. For a moment he bounces the pistol in his hand, appreciating its heft, smiling, smirking; it’s not just a firearm but a fiendish weapon, something evil, a talisman of bad tidings. Armed and dangerous.

I want him to acknowledge what I’ve done for him. That I’m special. His special.

Instead he says, “Te aventaste, güey,” then picks the spent cartridge off the floor and fits it like a hat on a nearby plastic Jesus.

Güey, like we’re big buddies instead of ex-lovers.

Toro lays the gun on the table. He disappears down the hall, a door closes, I hear a shower run. I imagine the water spattering off his muscular body and recall when it was me soaping his smooth contours and the crevices between them.

I fumble my screwdriver and almost let it fall. The act of catching the screwdriver brings my mind back to task. During the next minutes, I take care of the other two smart guns. The last pair in the bag are ghost-gun knockoffs of Serbian Zastavas, which I inspect and deem okay.

He’s left his phone on the table, and it vibrates with incoming messages.

The shower squeaks off. After a moment, he returns to the kitchen. His pink hair is slicked back so it looks like an old-fashioned bathing cap. He’s changed into designer jeans, alligator cowboy boots. A nice shirt hangs unbuttoned over his chest, a fresh wife-beater plastered to his still-wet, hairy pectorals. Lingering at the hall mirror, he reapplies kohl around his eyes. He pulls a gold chain from his pants pocket and strings it around his neck. Stepping close to retrieve his phone, he smells of soap and cologne, and the fragrance makes my heart ache for things that will never return.

He thumbs through his messages. Furrows his brow. Nods. Grins. I don’t know what he’s up to; it’s not my place to ask.

Regardless, my imagination starts to gallop, dragging behind it jealous thoughts. Who’s Toro going to see? Melissa Chacon? Or Enrico “el Perico” Tellez? That diseased marica. Better wear two condoms when you fuck him.

I really want to ask, but asking means I care, and I don’t want Toro to think that I do. I can’t. It’s long over between us. Tears pluck at my eyes, and I focus on putting my tools away.

Just as I zip my tool bag, Toro brings coffee and a campechana. While I finish the pastry, I watch him tuck the PW-Pro into his pants and fluff the shirt over it. He poses in front of the mirror, turning this way and that, like a ruca checking her ass for panty lines.

Since he’s packing this particular gun, I figure he’s heading out to work and not play, and the jealousy fades.

My business done, I slip my books into the backpack and grab my tool bag. Standing, I gasp for breath, then square my shoulders and face Toro.

Unexpectedly, he drops a hand on my shoulder. “Change in plans, vato. Espérame.”

He walks out the front door and the dead bolt clicks. When will he return? How long am I supposed to stay here? I don’t leave, because he owes me money, and besides, when Toro tells you to stay, you better stay.

I busy myself with my phone until I toss it aside, bored. I hope for his aunt to arrive and keep me company but she never makes an appearance. Maybe she smells trouble. I click on the television and when the screen asks for the password, I click it off and drop the remote on an end table.

I pick up my books and read for a while. I daydream about being a famous author like Leonardo Padura. As he did, I’ll chronicle my life through a series of novels, make it a majestic tale. I know crime. I know survival. Hell, I even have the scars. Me, Rafael Muñoz, the bard of the barrio. Maybe that’s my ticket out of here.

Afterward, I explore the cramped living room, analyzing the various trinkets Toro has collected since I was last here. My longing for him swirls in my head. I fantasize letting myself into his bedroom, crawling onto the mattress to luxuriate in his masculine scent clinging to the bed linen. I relive every delicious minute that we’d spent here, me taking each visit for granted, thinking there would always be a next time. And then, there were no more next times.

Twilight darkens the windows. I’m hungry and rummage the kitchen. I microwave a couple of tamales and help myself to a beer.

As the evening drags on, I stretch out on the sofa. The front door bangs open and I’m suddenly alert. I expect Toro’s aunt but it’s Ysidro Bustos, one of his gamberros. “Rafael, nos vamos.”

My mind scrambles to catch up. I gather my bags.

“Leave those.” He scowls. “Where’s your phone?”

I slip it from my pocket.

“Leave it in your backpack.”

After I comply, he nods toward the door. I follow him out. He shuts the door behind us, locks it with a key, and hustles toward the stairs. While he bounds down like a goat, I clasp the handrail and ease my way, step by step. Though the night is cool, each breath burns as it wheezes through my lungs.

Ysidro yells over his shoulder, “¡Apúrate, güey!”

I do my best to match his frantic pace. My chest tightens around the knot of my scar. In the pool of amber light beneath a corner streetlamp, a black SUV waits, its tinted windows sheets of obsidian. Ysidro hustles through the rear passenger door, leaving it ajar for me.

“¿Listos?” It’s Toro, in the front passenger seat, Pacho Ortiz driving. Toro gazes through his visor mirror. “Rafael, glad you could make it, ese.”

As if I had a choice.

We drive north, circle through Thornton, buy whiskey, stop someplace else for smokes, then turn back to Globeville. We halt by the Polish church and everyone but Pacho gets out. We’re not too far from where I’d arrived on the bus. Pacho continues south on Camino. I figure the runaround is Toro leaving a false trail in the SUV’s GPS.

The church looms dark and silent like a mausoleum. Small houses clutter the neighborhood, each a compact fortress. Porch lights outline wire fences and reflect the eyes of watchdogs. The Mousetrap blots out a swath of the night sky.

Toro explains nothing about why we’re here, only walks into the construction site. Ysidro keeps at his heels, whispering. I trudge along, trying to eavesdrop, but their words are smothered by the whoosh of highway traffic.

We make our way through a gap in the temporary chain-link fence and proceed to a dirt ramp that leads into the pit. Headlamps spilling from the overpass sweep the area, backlit by construction work in the distance, creating a panorama of bizarre sculptures. Toro and Ysidro trot down the ramp but for me it’s a grueling stop and go.

Our destination is one of the holes for a footing. Another vato emerges from the gloom, Chuy. Toro’s most trusted matón.

The reason why we’re here blooms.

The hole. Me.

My heart starts to race and my breath gets thick as glue.

Why me? It doesn’t matter. Maybe Toro is simply cleaning house.

Lightheaded, I want to turn and run, but I wouldn’t get far. A pressure builds against my temples. My mind somersaults, spinning with regrets and abandoned dreams. The scar in my chest feels like Death is clawing me with a bony finger.

Feet dragging, docile as a cow on the way to the slaughterhouse, I reach the plywood formers that circumscribe the square dimensions of the hole, about three feet square. Dizzy, nauseous, I force myself to gaze into the abyss, my grave.

I expect Toro, Ysidro, and Chuy to seize me and finish this business. Toro glances to acknowledge that I’m here, then goes back to chatting with the other two. His tats shimmer blue, then green.

Bastard! What’s he waiting for? It feels as though a rope tightens around my neck and I’m about to swing.

A pair of headlamps approach. It’s a small van, a 4x4 Prowler the construction crews use to haul whatever. The Prowler hums to a halt. The headlamps click off. The darkness swallows us again. Ysidro and Chuy open the back and drag free what appears to be a rolled-up carpet. But it’s not. It’s a man wrapped in a canvas tarp.

He’s dumped on the ground as the Prowler circles and leaves. Ysidro and Chuy yank on the tarp until the man emerges, rolling like a hot dog. He flops onto his belly, hands behind his back, wrists and ankles bound with duct tape. He squirms, still alive. Ysidro uses his foot to push the man over but keeps him on the tarp.

Tape also covers his mouth. His ruddy face is flushed red and his eyes radiate terror. Sweat trickles from his hairline. He’s wearing jeans, a golf jacket, trainers.

Toro crouches and searches the man’s pockets, withdraws an ID badge and a gold shield. He peruses the badge, then flips it into the hole. The shield is passed around. It’s heavy, quality stuff, and reads, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. The dreaded ATF. Feds.

“Este cabrón estaba en la pista de mis negocios.”

This doomed gabacho is about to pay the price for getting too close to Toro.

Toro dumps the shield into the hole, then reaches under his shirt and pulls out the PW-Pro that I’d earlier fixed for him.

The ATF agent’s eyes latch onto the gun.

“Rafael,” Toro says.

I look at him confused.

“Dame tu mano.”

I present my hand.

He slaps the PW-Pro into my palm. Instantly, I know why I’m here.

“Eres más que tus pinchi libros,” Toro says. “Ya es tiempo que crezcas. Que dejas la niñez y te mantienes de pie con nosotros como hombre.”

He’s thrown everything noble about me back into my face. From this point, there’s only one way forward. At his side. As one of him. With this thought, the scar in my chest cracks open, becoming a drain that funnels every malignant thing in the world into my body.

The ATF agent shifts his gaze to me. His expression screams, pleading, begging for mercy.

But his fate is as sealed as mine.

The pistol, this instrument of death, feels heavy as though it were carved from a tombstone. I grip it with both hands, shaking. I try to rise above myself, to float in an altered state above this putrid catastrophe, but I can’t. Every detail remains in sharp focus, needles that etch this bleak moment into my conscience.

Toro snorts impatiently. His tattoos flare electric yellow. He cups the back of my neck and forces me to a knee beside the condemned man. Toro clutches my wrist and slews me forward until the pistol’s muzzle presses against the agent’s forehead.

The agent and I stare at each other — eyes misted with mutual fear and helplessness.

“¡Ya!” Toro barks.

I jerk the trigger, a loud bang cleaves my hearing, the gun bucks in my hand. Acrid smoke wisps, then vanishes. Ears ringing, trembling, I stagger to my feet.

Blood weeps from a puckered hole along the ridge of the man’s left eyebrow. The eyeball below is distended, clouded, and turning gray, black. I recoil, gagging, convinced the eyeball is about pop out. The other eye glistens like polished glass. More blood fans across the tarp, behind his left ear where the bullet exited. The agent quivers in a palsy of agony. Snot bubbles from his nostrils.

Toro clamps onto my upper arm, steadying me. “De este momento, estamos siempre empatados, tu y yo, el y tu. No hay salida.”

The dying gringo. Toro. Me. Our fates are locked together. Forever.

Toro takes the PW-Pro from my hands. Ysidro and Chuy bundle the agent in the tarp, then lift and upend him headfirst into the footing hole. He slides in and thuds against the bottom. I hear the rustling of fabric and a muted groan.

Toro picks up the spent cartridge shell and throws it in the hole. His fellow thugs grab nearby shovels and spend time tossing in dirt. Two minutes? Five? I don’t know. All I recognize is that my already broken life is now a pile of useless shards.

On Toro’s cue, we start back to the dirt ramp. A tractor rumbles from the adjacent construction area and parks close to the hole to angle a pneumatic rammer into the void. A percussive noise carries toward us as the tractor tamps the bottom of the hole. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa.

I imagine the ATF agent, limbs contorted painfully, blood squeezed from the pulp of his mangled face, suffocating as the earth packs around him. By midmorning, he’ll be buried under a pillar of cement and rebar. By the end of the week, the rest of the overpass will have been poured, entombing him beneath thousands of tons of concrete.

Is the agent forever disappeared? How long is the Mousetrap expected to last? A century? Longer? Perhaps it will outlive our government, our civilization, and our descendants will regard this structure as a historic relic, as inviolate as the aqueducts of Ancient Rome.

I struggle up the incline, so lost in my fugue that it isn’t until I’m confronted by the electronic babble from the Peace Memorial that I realize we’re back at street level.

On the sidewalk, we trek north. Toro lights a smoke. Chuy and Ysidro share a joint. Cars pass. No one sees nothin’. No one knows nothin’. Just another night in Globeville.

We arrive at the stop for the southbound number 12. The black SUV waits by the curb. Toro reaches into the rear seat and retrieves my backpack and tool bag. Up the street, a rectangular outline of yellow lamps heralds the approach of the bus.

Toro taps his phone. My backpack buzzes. It’s my phone. When I check it, the text reads: New deposit.

Toro says, “Lo que te debo, mil quinientos,” and then flashes a welfare debit card that he slides into my shirt pocket. “Un poco de propina. Loaded to the max, carnal. You and your mom are set for the month.”

With both hands, he cups my face. Our macho jefe leans close and kisses me gently on the lips. He pulls back but keeps his big taurine eyes on me.

I wait for him to say something, to reassure me that I mean something, that I’m more than a tool, more than his chew toy.

Wordlessly, Toro and crew hop into the SUV and motor away. The bus eases forward, sighs to a halt. I climb aboard, show my pass, and slide onto a vacant seat. Through the window, I read the message cycling on the Peace Memorial: Stop the shooting! Love one another!