The fire cracked and popped and danced, an orange entity in an otherwise black and quiet night. Don Javier Solano sat on the hard-packed ground before it, the flames warm on his face, the photographs of his family held in his hands. The top one showed his wife, Paola, next to his two daughters, Carolina and Fátima. He and Paola married without either of their parents’ permission when they were both nineteen years old. They eloped from Veracruz to Mexico City the following year and opened a tamale stand. It didn’t make them rich, but it paid the bills and put food on the table, and they were happy. Solano knew he would have been happy even had they been dirt broke. Paola had that effect on him. She was pure and good, the kindest person he’d ever known—the last person in the world that deserved to be buried to death in the bed where she slept.

Carolina, his eldest, had inherited her mother’s beauty, though she never had the chance to grow fully into it. She was fourteen when she too died in the bed where she slept. This was not only unfair, it was tragic. She had so much to live for, so much to give back to the world, so much joy to spread. She wanted to be a schoolteacher and eventually a principal. “But not like the mean principal at my school,” she always added. “I would be a nice one. I would actually listen when students had a problem.” She had a fantasy of living “down the block” so Javier and Paola could visit often, owning a dog and a cat and a rabbit, with a large kitchen so she could cook massive dinners for everyone.

She had been a great role model for her younger sister. In fact, Fátima had worshiped her, often imitating Carolina’s hair styles and mannerisms and fashion. Fátima…always giggling, forever into mischief, innocent, angelic. The tears Solano had been fighting sprung to his eyes. She would be ten years old now. Ten years old and a triplegic, bed-ridden, nothing working but a head and an arm. Sometimes he thought it would have been better had she died with her mother and sister in the firecracker explosion. She would have been at peace.

The explosion occurred in the dead of night. There was a sound like thunder, and then the walls and ceiling were falling down all around him…then there was shouting and flashlights, firefighters lifting chunks of concrete off him, escorting him through the rubble of what had once been his bedroom, telling him not to look back. Barely conscious he did just that, looked back, and saw Paola—or what had become of his wife, for all that was visible beneath a slab of concrete was a blood-slicked arm and leg.