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rat. How’s that sound?”
    “Wait, wait, list—” he began, and the boy swung a crowbar into the tough basement window.
    The ankles appeared; no mistaking who that was, wearing cloth sneakers and a bracelet made with shells twined one to the other. She made a stance like pitching a shovel and when she brought it forward, right across the slit of the broken window, something splashed on the hostage and splattered on him, too.
    It tasted spent in his mouth, and the girl spat too, through her shattered face.
    “Let’s do it, man,” said the girl hostage, and she caught a matchbook so small he couldn’t tell what it was. By the time she had a match out and between the cover and the striker, it was too late.
    “Love you, Glori,” said the girl, and it broke his heart to hear, even as the boy in front of her doused her with sludgy cooking oil. The girl pressed to his chest could’ve broken loose if she weren’t so weary from the fight on the stairwell.
    “You my fuckin homey,” said his hostage to her girlfriend, going to her fate with heart.
    She struck the match and lit the whole book and touched it to her soaked clothes and she went up. He stumbled as she lunged, and the liquid flames jumped from her shirt and spread on the floor and the walls and the beams; hot, shooting flames twisting toward the sucking air of the shattered porthole window, thin and wide, channeling the flames like the vent on a grill.
    He got to his feet, disoriented, unable to bolt for the storm door until he planted himself and knew just where he was. The hot grease made crackling sounds on her skin as she roared with flame, filling his lungs with a sweet aroma of chicarrones , filling his lungs with smoke, filling his brain with the remembrance of holding his aunt’s hand at the market as she broke off pieces of the fried pig skin for him to eat.
    Some of his clothes were soaked too and he whipped them off his back in an instant, panicking over whether to hold onto them, or throw them in a dry corner or directly into the flames. Lose, lose, lose.
    His eyes watered and he stumbled into a beam. He averted his eyes from the girl, who gurgled instead of screamed on the dusty floor of the basement as the flames spread and climbed the walls and feasted on the dry, cracking eaves, fed by the oil which spattered and leapt everywhere.
    It spat on him and he brushed it away from his arm and his clothes and through the rich, black wood smoke, he could see the path to the storm door. He staggered at it and bashed it with his shoulder.
    He rammed so hard that one of the beams propping up the basement split, so weakened by the shooting flames. The storm door flung open, belching smoke and issuing his body forth like a bone caught in the throat.

23:55
    LUIS CRAWLED FROM the entrance, squeezing his body through, urged on by nipping flames and the blanket of billowing smoke. He sucks air into his lungs and it’s too much and he hacks up blood onto the dusty patch. The boy’s feet pace casually and two of them trail behind, hopping with adrenaline.
    His eyes sting when they pinch close, running with sooty grease.
    Behind him, the fire roars, blowing out the windows, flagging away from the building. Two upstairs windows and the back door glow in the inferno, making the block frame visage of a blazing skull.
    He looks up at it; the bonfire of everything left in his life, soon to be a forest of charcoaled timber. A pyre for a man who didn’t bend his knee to the new masters, a ritual fire to forge the souls of those brave enough to play on Mischief Night, a horrid diversion in the neverending whirlwind of lawlessness.
    The one with the gun, the short one, their chief - he seems the calmest of all, like those boys in war who’ve known nothing but, young face impossibly old. A face like that could be the warlord of this city, ruling this trammeled, ruined place once they’ve finally run out of people to maim and kill and rape.
    Maybe the people who live in