Vinnie Afton, forever a creature of motion and impulse, led Maggie by the hand through the burning workshop in a trail of bloody footprints, remembering an evening before his cousin's Quinceanera.
The back yard had been lit up like a stage by shop lights after sundown. At his mother's insistence he and his brothers and sisters had all been learning how to dance so that they wouldn't embarrass her in front of the more traditional side of the family on his pretty cousin's big day.
Some Vinnie already knew; every now and then abuelita, granny who lived a block over, had tried in vain to teach them to him and his mob of younger siblings on long Sunday afternoons after Mass and a big family lunch. Straightening to his full height, Vinnie stamped and posed his way through the opening of La Bamba towards where Maggie sat sketching, arms at his sides, feet clattering on the pavers in time to the music, one of his sister's jump ropes coiled around his waist in the one dance he knew by heart.
The world his drum, he'd presented himself to her on one knee, hand out invitingly, a big goofy grin on his face, bottle red hair falling over his eyes.
Maggie, not one to participate when she could watch, actually took it.
Blushing, the gangly boy led her out into the center of the patio to the applause of his family, showing her the steps as they went.
Hesitant, Maggie gained confidence so that by the time he'd signaled to her that he wanted her to take the end of the jump rope so that he could spin away from her, uncoiling it a long tail, she knew what she needed to do.
In a burst of static, the back yard with it's improvised lighting disappeared, leaving them two ragged figures. She, a grotesque three-legged, two-headed monstrosity. He, a shop-worn parody of a fox pretending to be a pirate: both merging into the graceful animatronics the neighbor across the street created from Maggie's sketches so very long ago.
To the tune of La Bamba as sung by the quetzal bird on her shoulder, Margarite the white fox displaying for admiration her pink and white skirts and elaborately embroidered apron with one dainty paw, coquettish fan in the other, tucking a daisy behind one ear as Vincente, tall in his fine white linen suit with a red scarf fluttering around his neck and new straw hat stacattoed around her, legs pistons on the hot concrete, Margarite uncoiling a red silk sash from around his waist as he spun, steering her closer and closer to Spike's crate.
His neighbor's finest unseen creations maneuvered the dropped sash with their feet into a knot, the blood rune Simon had taught his father to make inside their metal skulls animating them, trapping them as The Grand Rialto tore itself to pieces, finishing to wild applause among the luminarias and fireflies.
Bowing, Vincente stole a boy's kiss from Margarite, shoving her into the box which could only hold one, slamming it shut, so that it thudded backwards out onto the cracked cement edge of the back loading dock and into the alley.
Heat shriveling the remains of his gaudy red pelt so that it exposed his titanium skeleton, Vinnie Afton, trapped by the boundaries of the building, by his father's spell, stepped back into the workroom turned furnace, watching the hose dragging firefighters as they run around Maggie's crate, wetting down the surrounding buildings.
The Grand Rialto's roof collapsed, taking the ragged fox boy with eyes like two old brass coins and the memory of one perfect evening with it.