by K. Alexander Perez

The tires screeched over the asphalt and whipped a plume of smoke over the intersection. Past midnight in an industrial block of town, three pony cars with mismatched bumpers and panels drifted together in an erratic spiral. More than a hundred 20-somethings and teens hollered over the revved engines and booming sound systems. As the takeover gladiators spun their chariots, they saluted the plebs with middle fingers and tongues in the cramped coliseum. When the tail of a car swung just past them, the crowd only stepped closer to get the perfect angle for their phones.

Julio “Pinhead” Linares observed the show from his car. He had parked in the front lot of a wholesale tile warehouse. 2Good sat in the passenger seat, and Outheway, Basspro, and Cebolla stood around the car. The trio outside passed around a canister of nitrous oxide that left their legs wobbly. As Basspro leaned on the car, Julio turned down the music and glared at him. Basspro frowned and looked at 2Good, who shrugged and said, “It’s the man’s ride, Pro.”

Basspro grumbled and took another hit of the canister. 2Good looked over at Julio and said, “Y’know, Pin, you’re pretty protective of a thing you might wreck in the next half-hour.”

Julio ran his hand along the window edge of his baby, his muse, his 2022 Collet Cavalier in Royal Blue. He had spent most of his hard labor running petty scams to tune up his vehicle. He had upgraded the sway bars, replaced the flywheel, remapped the ECU, expanded the cylinder capacity, and made plenty of other modifications inappropriate for a car whose purpose was to do donuts in a crowded intersection. As always, he had washed and waxed the Cavalier, and the bold blue of his whip glistened under the streetlights. The immaculate pony had a flawless record in the pit, and in the parlance of the takeovers, his whip looked wet.

“She’ll be fine,” Julio said.

2Good mouthed out the word she and rolled his eyes. He stretched his arms wide to yawn, and he glimpsed the card skimmer lying on the back seat. He picked it up and waved it in Julio’s face.

“The fuck?” 2Good asked. “You were supposed to hook this up at that gas station on Fig.”

Julio stayed glued to the dance of steel and rubber in the intersection. He shrugged and said, “Lost track of time. Didn’t want to be late.”

2Good slid the card skimmer under his seat and said, “You didn’t get a tee time to be here, bro.”

On the other side of the intersection, ensconced in a crowd of people and smoke, they heard a car subwoofer rattling a Drakeo the Ruler mixtape. 2Good pointed into the crowd and said, “I know why you were in a rush, Pin.”

Julio side-eyed him and said, “Stop it.”

“You keep trying to get at that girl,” 2Good said, “and that foo Hevee is gonna fuck you and your ride up.”

Julio raised a hand quizzically and said, “I say wassup to Steph now and then.”

“You’re obsessed,” 2Good said. “Since 9th grade when she curved you.”

Julio shook his head and muttered, “Like I give a fuck about her.”

Julio had been obsessed with Stephanie since Biology class, when she asked for a piece of gum and complimented him on his “gold” necklace from the shady vendor at the swap meet. Back then, his wardrobe consisted of hand-me-downs or clearance rack sales, and he didn’t earn too many compliments from his peers. When he slowed down during P.E. to keep pace with the group of girls walking the mile run, he asked Stephanie if she wanted to eat lunch together later. The raucous laughter of the girls calling him bummy, while Stephanie covered her face in embarrassment, seared into his brain.

“So why do we keep coming here?” 2Good asked. “I don’t fuck with this takeover shit, and the boys don’t care where they get fucked up for the night.”

“I need a reason?” Julio asked.

After the P.E. incident, he started selling donuts from the corner spot with 2Good, who even then could hawk a too-good-to-be-true deal. They got enough cash to start dressing beyond clearance, and the business spiraled into selling fell-off-the-truck knickknacks that 2Good’s cousin supplied. By the time they started card cracking, Julio had bought a real gold chain, and he would have asked Stephanie out again, if not for Hevee. The tall, pale, misnamed bean pole had dropped out his senior year, after he realized he was making more money than his teachers as the local plug. After school, he would pick up Stephanie in his Byrd Sabre, blowing up the neighborhood with his stereo before blasting off. Despite his glow-up, Julio never had a chance.

“Yes, bruh,” 2Good said. “You’re pissing Hevee off every time you drive into the pit with him.”

“He’s not that scary.”

“That dude is a criminal, man,” 2Good said.

“We are criminals, man,” Julio said, pointing at the card skimmer under the seat.

“No, we’re not,” 2Good said. “Hevee’s a criminal criminal. We’re like … misfits. We’re gonna stop scamming soon. Get a business plan together and all that.”

“Yeah, tell that to the Doña who told you her Social Security number over the phone,” Julio said.

As the ponies spun their squelching ballet on the pavement, they heard a clamor of yo what the fuck from the spectators. The steady shrill of the tires turned staccato, and the figure eights of the vehicles widened until all three ponies slammed into each other. The crash reverberated through the intersection, and Julio saw a bumper skid across the pavement while a license plate sliced through the air. As the spectators jeered at the wreck, he squinted and saw a diminutive figure through the smoke.

Julio’s heart sank into his stomach when he heard someone yell out whose pinche kid is that? He jumped out of the car and ran into the crowd.

“The hell are you going?” 2Good asked, springing after him.

Julio parted through the spectators trying to film the intersection, but they all scratched their heads as their camera app kept crashing. What he knew that they didn’t was that it was impossible to take footage of him. As he waved the wisps of smoke away from his face, he saw a small child sitting crisscross in a circle of burned rubber. The child wore a dirty white smock, no shoes, and a giant wizard hat on his head. He looked no older than ten, and he would never look older than ten.

The child ran a finger along the streak of burned rubber beside him, and he licked the smoldering residue and said, “Yum.”

Julio groaned and asked, “What the hell are you doing here, Cipitio?”

The Cipitio looked up at Julio, smiled his unfading, cherub smirk, and said, “I wanted to watch you race cars, Julio.”

Julio massaged his forehead and said, “We don’t race cars. We—look, what are you doing here? I just saw you a few days ago.”

“Why does that matter?” the Cipitio asked, folding his arms into his chest. “I can see you whenever I want.”

Julio pointed at the wrecked cars limping out of the intersection and yelled, “Just look at what you did!”

The Cipitio scratched his chin and said, “Hmph, but I saw other people standing a lot closer.”

2Good ran up to the pair, saw the Cipitio and said, “Ah, shit. We gotta get him out of here.”

Julio shook his head and said, “He only leaves whenever he wants.”

“Then let’s at least get him out of the damn intersection,” 2Good said, running back to the car.

Julio sighed, gestured toward the Collet Cavalier in Royal Blue and said, “C’mon Cipitio. Let’s go sit in the car.”

“Wow, really?” the Cipitio asked. “You never like when I sit in your car.”

The Cipitio stood up, and as he walked toward the car, the crowd of spectators gasped in revulsion. Once one got past the braided palm wizard hat, the grimy rags he wore, and the ferocious stench of decay, one realized he was not so much an oddity as he was a walking sacrilege. Below the waist, the Cipitio’s knees bent forward while his feet pointed backward. Although his face appeared youthful, the ravages of the centuries stretched across his decrepit legs and feet in a spiderweb of varicose veins. He seemed to defy gravity with every step that teetered on his heel, and it sent shudders and shame into anyone witnessing this unnatural, not-meant-to-be-understood act.

The takeover crowd shielded their eyes from the boy’s stride, and Julio put his hand behind the Cipitio and pushed him forward. “C’mon, let’s hurry up,” he said.

According to Julio’s grandmother, in the heyday of the Kingdom of Cuzcatlan, the devil conspired with the lustful queen to bring ruin to the kingdom. The king fell in battle, and his father, the thunder god Tláloc, cursed the queen for her betrayal, her son for being spawned from the devil, and the kingdom for failing to protect his son. The queen was twisted into the monstrosity known as the Siguanaba, and her son was deformed into the creature known as the Cipitio. Both were cursed with immortality to terrorize Cuzcatlan and all its descendants for eternity. Now every Salvadoran, whether in the old country or abroad, is at risk of being plagued by mother or son. The only way to reverse the curse is for the Siguanaba to catch up to the Cipitio, but whenever she picks up his trail of backward footsteps, she follows where he left and not where he’s going.

As they pushed through the crowd, a bystander grabbed Julio’s shoulder and asked, “Bro, what is that?”

Julio shook his hand off and said, “He’s my Salvi friend. He’s cool.”

Julio’s grandmother had seen the Cipitio since she was a child living in La Uníon, and he continued cutting her apron strings and spitting in her meals when her daughter brought her to Los Angeles. When Julio reported he had seen the Cipitio on his own, abuelita was the one who had to break the news to him. There are some Salvis who see the cursed child once in their life, some who see him every so often, and then there are those burdened with being the Cipitio’s stalwart companion. Through his childhood and adolescence, the Cipitio had disrupted graduations, driving exams, and most attempts at a normal life. Even when he tried to floss his new money in high school, people still thought of him as the kid who made that freakish child appear. Four years after graduation, he didn’t fare much better, as the Cipitio would stumble into dates and club nights without a care.

The Cipitio hopped into the back of the Cavalier, and he stretched his fungus-wracked feet over the plush leather. “Comfy!” he said.

As Julio took his seat, 2Good said, “I guess we gotta dip.”

“What?” Julio asked. “Why?”

2Good turned to the Cipitio. The kid-creature had lifted his hat over his eyes and drifted off into a cat nap. “You’re gonna drive into the pit with this thing in the car?” he asked.

Julio rested his head against the steering wheel. “Shit,” he said. “You’re right. He’s gonna be stuck with us the whole night.”

2Good shrugged and said, “Fuck it. Let’s post up somewhere and wait it out.”

Julio looked across where the Drakeo tape kept booming and shook his head. “I gotta stay, Good,” he said. “I can’t break my streak.”

2Good widened his eyes and said, “Bro, you will crash if you do your little donut shit with the kid in here.”

Across the way, the crowd shifted as the rattling bass and frenetic snares became louder. The gaudiest Byrd Sabre in existence, colored in Lavender, decked with gold BBS wheels, and sporting a spoiler about to grow another spoiler on top of it, parted through the crowd like Moses at the Red Sea. It rumbled along the edges of the intersection, and the crowd roared as if the lions had been let loose in the amphitheater.

A stoned kid in a ragged flannel came up to the Cavalier. He knocked on the window and asked, “Yo, uh, Hevee asked if you’re still gonna hop into the pit?”

The kid look at the backseat, and he saw one of the Cipitio’s backward feet bent up in the air. He rubbed his eyes and said, “That’s fucked up, bro.”

As the Sabre passed them by, Julio saw Stephanie sitting on the window’s edge of the car. Not exactly Helen of Troy, he still found himself drawn to the plump girl with blocky glasses for her astigmatism. She had a breezy lightness to her voice with a loud, full laugh that would lift the room, and she could recall the tiniest details about Julio. Other than seeing each other at the takeovers, he would drop by the dispensary she worked at. He would ask her about the different strains, since he genuinely didn’t know much about weed, since he genuinely didn’t smoke much. Before going back home and tossing his purchase to the rest of the card-cracking crew, they would chat about their respective day-to-days and any new news. Their convos would quickly settle into awkward goodbyes at the lack of new news.

Stephanie sat outside the Sabre, flipped a middle finger at the crowd, and laughed in the faces of the inebriated, ratchet mass of humanity. Julio always thought she was a good egg despite sticking with a scumbag like Hevee. She took care of her mom and grandmother and even sent money back to the rest of her family in Ecuador. Her fuck you, to the boorish kids yelling back fuck you, when all everybody really meant was fuck this, fuck minimum wage and fuck trade school and fuck the landlord and fuck the cops, made Julio remember he was a part-time EosMobile salesman and full-time scammer, a former gifted kid turned adult without a college education and gaps in his resume. Irrationality pulled the rug out from under his reasoning, and he thought to himself, fuck it.

“Yeah, we’re good,” Julio told the kid.

As the kid in the flannel shambled off to the Sabre, 2Good threw his hands up in the air and said, “Aight, bro.”

He stepped out of the car and said, “I’mma head to the crib. I won’t be an accessory to this madness.”

As 2Good turned to leave, Julio asked him, “Et tu, Brute?”

2Good turned back, reached inside the car to punch him on the shoulder and said, “Dumb motherfucker. You’re too smart to be this fucking dumb.”

He walked away shaking his head, and the Cipitio woke up, hopped into the passenger seat and exclaimed, “Yay! I can sit in the front now!”

Julio waved over at Outheway, who cradled the canister of NOS to cut off Cebolla and Basspro for the night. The broad-shouldered ex-linebacker didn’t have the computer smarts of the lanky nerds pawing at the canister, but he had several other uses to the card-cracking crew.

“Yo, Outtie!” Julio said. “Do your thing.”

Outheway puffed out his chest and yelled, “Let’s fucking go!”

The former ball player barreled into the crowd and began swiping away the bystanders in his path. Julio trailed behind him in the Cavalier, and with every groggy youth he shoved aside, Outheway yelled, “Fuck out the way!”

As they pushed through the crowd, the Cipitio stared at the rowdy attendees either filming on their phones or posing in their friends’ videos.

“Wow,” the Cipitio said, flinging a booger out of the car. “These people look funny.”

“Yeah, they’re wild,” Julio said.

“And they’re all your friends?” the Cipitio asked.

“Fuck—er, hell no,” Julio said. “These foos got their only two brain cells on paid vacation.”

“Is that because Christmas is coming?” the Cipitio asked.

Julio groaned and muttered, “Never mind.”

They pushed past the stoplight and into the intersection, and Outheway tapped the hood of the car, flashed them a thumbs up, and hurtled back into the crowd. Julio revved up the Cavalier a few times to make the crowd roar. He strolled along the edge of the square, letting everyone see his pride and joy of a money sink. His ride was immaculate, and by extension so was he, and the clamor of the takeover as he lapped around the intersection confirmed it. As accurate as 2Good might have been about Stephanie, the turbulent drumming of the crowd at the sight of him—him—was why he never missed a takeover.

Julio, a little more relaxed with his unwanted passenger, nudged the Cipitio and said, “Go ahead and hang out the window. Say hi.”

The Cipitio beamed as if he had been waiting for him to say so. The kid-creature hopped up on the window, and he waved his enormous hat around as if he was a bull rider in a rodeo. His misshapen feet remained inside the car, and it made the crowd more amenable to his appearance. They gave him high-fives and tousled his hair as he passed by, but a few who kept their cameras on the child found their phones crashing again.

After a few laps, the Cipitio popped back into the passenger seat and whistled in amazement. The eerie shrill pierced Julio’s concentration, and he veered the car for a second before correcting course.

Julio took a deep breath and said, “You can’t do that in here.”

“But it’s exciting,” the Cipitio said. “You got all these people to see you crash your car.”

Julio raised an eyebrow. “What?” he asked. “Nah, they’re here to watch me do donuts.”

The Cipitio looked at the discarded bumper from the last crash and said, “Huh, but they were laughing when those cars hit each other.”

“Yeah, cause those guys were clowns,” Julio said. “I actually put on a show.”

“Clowns put on shows too,” the Cipitio said. “That’s actually all they do.”

Julio shook his head and said, “Nah, watch. You’ll see them go crazy for me for real.”

He swerved beside the Sabre waiting in the middle of the pit. The driver’s window slid down, and a gaunt, red-eyed man wearing a designer hoodie popped his bubble gum at him. The massive chains on Hevee’s neck clanked as he flicked his chin up at him to say wassup. Behind him, Stephanie wiggled her fingers to say hello.

Hevee looked at the Cipitio in the passenger seat, grinned and said, “Haven’t seen that marranito since he pantsed you in the gym, Pinhead.”

“Really?” Julio asked. “I thought fetal alcohol syndrome affected memory.”

Hevee spit his gum out and said, “So, you still down to do this?”

Julio resisted looking at the Cipitio, shrugged and said, “Why not.”

Hevee draped his arm over the window frame, showing off a glimmering Swiss watch with too many dials on it. “Y’know,” he said. “I’d be pissed if I ended up fucking up my car, but end of the day I can get it all back.”

Hevee draped his other arm over Stephanie, and he snapped his fingers hanging outside the car. “Like that,” he said. “How ‘bout you?”

Julio ignored him, looked over at Stephanie and smiled. “Sorry if you can smell him from there,” he said.

Stephanie smiled back, waved the remark off and said, “It’s all good, Pin. I’ve got a brother-in-law who’s Salvi. I get it.”

Julio turned to the Cipitio and said, “You wanna chime in before we get started?”

The Cipitio scratched under his hat and asked, “How do we tell who wins?”

Hevee pointed at himself and said, “I win, whenever this chump gets tired and calls it a night.”

The Cipitio rubbed his chin and asked, “So, whoever has nothing else to do wins every time?”

Hevee scowled while Stephanie covered her mouth and suppressed a laugh. Julio jabbed a friendly elbow at the kid-creature and revved up the Cavalier. He saluted the couple in the Sabre, and he peeled off into the edges of the pit.

Julio gripped the steering wheel tight as he swung over 3,000 pounds of metal around the intersection. The Sabre soon began its own grating dance from the other end of the pit. Inside the arena, the noise of engines straining and rubber peeling drowned out the roar of the crowd. The smell of burnt rubber filtered into the car, and the dust and smoke of their dance clouded the windshield. His main positional reference became the Sabre that kept swinging past his Cavalier and missing it by inches.

The Cipitio hung onto his hat, and over the noise he yelled, “Why are you doing this!? I thought you liked your car!”

“I love my car!” Julio yelled back.

The Cipitio pointed at the groaning engine and said, “She doesn’t think so!”

The longer they spun around the pit, the more Julio settled into the zone. If his last fiber of sense abandoned him, he would have driven with his eyes closed.

“Why do you let people call you Pinhead?” the Cipitio asked. “That sounds mean!”

“Because I’m good with—uh—numbers!” Julio yelled. “Look! Ask me questions later! I gotta focus!”

The Cipitio pouted and rapped his fingers on the door panel. After a minute, he reached for the radio and asked, “What do they play this time of night?”

Julio swatted his hand away, and the car lurched too close to the crowd with only one hand on the wheel. The bystanders cursed at him, and Julio readjusted and mumbled, “Shit.”

As he got back in sync with the figure eights of the Sabre, Julio yelled, “Don’t touch anything, Cipitio! Do me this favor, for once!”

Through the smoke, they saw a drunk stumble too close inside the pit. The rear of the Sabre skidded into the drunk’s path, and he flipped into the air as the Sabre nonchalantly continued.

“But I’m getting bored!” the Cipitio yelled. “How much longer?”

Julio groaned and said, “Then find something to do!”

The Cipitio crossed his arms and grumbled, and if Julio wasn’t so preoccupied, he would’ve noticed the sly, cherub smirk spread across the kid-creature’s face.

The Cipitio snapped his fingers and said, “I know how to pass the time!”

Julio looked over and saw the Cipitio purse his lips. “No!” he yelled. “Don’t do it!”

Before the whistle warbled from the kid-creature’s mouth, Julio heard it in his head. A razor-wire melody burrowed deep in his mind. A tormented howl with traces of a childish glee scoured his thoughts, and the word sound could not capture the dread of something never sensed but still felt, something that just appeared in the inner crevices of his being. Although Julio knew it was pointless, every time he heard the Cipitio whistle, he could not help but cover his ears. His hands left the steering wheel to futilely block the noise.

The 2022 Collet Cavalier in Royal Blue, tuned to the gills with upgraded sway bars, a remapped ECU, and a whole host of chingaderas better saved for a different form of recreation, jerked to the center of the pit with a screech. In the agony of the Cipitio’s whistle and the haze of burnt rubber, Julio could not see his car head straight into the crowd, and they might’ve mowed down a dozen belligerent revelers if not for the crack of metal on metal and the world suddenly spinning all at once. The gaudy Byrd Sabre in Lavender rear-ended his Cavalier on the right, sending them into a tailspin back into the middle of the intersection. Julio’s shoulder smashed into the door panel, and the Cipitio stopped whistling to yell out, “A la gran puchica!”

The whistle slipped out his head like water down the drain, and the pain in Julio’s left shoulder jolted him back to his senses. He grabbed the wheel, and he slammed the brakes to skid to a halt. His shoulder stiffened up, and when he tried to lift his arm a shooting pain spiraled out from his side. Julio gritted his teeth, and he looked over and saw the Cipitio unscathed save for his hat slightly askew.

The Cipitio straightened his hat, pouted and said, “That’s the last time I sit in your car.”

Julio opened the door with his good arm and said, “Deal. Let’s go see what’s left of it.”

As they stepped out, the haze around the pit began to dissipate. Julio stepped back from his Cavalier, and the sight of the bashed-in pony numbed his stiff shoulder and the rest of him. The impact had detached his rear bumper, shattered his rear fender into pieces, and cratered the right wheel rim. Seeing the pony in this shape made him wonder if he had to take the beauty behind the barn at this point, and a stream of PIN numbers, SSNs, passwords and other furtive digits now wasted ran through his head. He listlessly thumbed the jagged edge of what was left of his fender.

As the numbness subsided and reality set in, the sound of a hundred claps, whistles, screams, close-friends list story narrations, and choruses of this stupid ass foo echoed all around Julio. The smoke of the pit’s dance had evaporated, and the crowd came into view. Chattering yellow or hastily veneered teeth flashed at him, amorphous bodies jostled into each other as they rocked with laughter, and somehow more fingers than there were hands in the crowd pointed at him and his smashed pony. Even those that turned their back on him only did so to frame their faces in their recordings as they yelled out, we outside!

Julio’s eyes darted between his beat Cavalier and the delirious crowd before finally landing on the Cipitio, sitting on the stray bumper. “C’mon let’s dip,” Julio murmured.

Before they could hop back in the Cavalier, the doors of the Sabre a few meters away opened. The hood of the car had scrunched up like a bad hairline, and everything around it had crumbled onto the intersection. Julio wondered if there was a tiny victory in Hevee’s car looking worse than his, but as Stephanie stepped out sluggishly, that idea was quickly dashed. The left lens in her glasses had cracked, and she massaged the back of her neck as she locked eyes with Julio. Her glare brimmed with righteous annoyance rather than murderous vengeance, which made him think it was just whiplash. He sighed, knowing this was probably the end of his dispensary visits.

From the other side of the Sabre, Hevee stumbled out covering his face. Splotches of red had stained his white tee. When he let go of his face, Julio saw his nose sloping to the left while he wheezed through his mouth. A drip-drop of blood fell from his nostrils to the floor. The skinny peddler tried to wipe away the blood from his hands and jewels, but every wipe stained something else. When he looked up, he saw the crowd taunting him too, and his beleaguered wheezing turned into a tense gnarl. Hevee had never been an imposing figure in his Abe Lincoln frame, but his first high school suspension had been legendary in dissuading anyone from ever testing him again. Julio had watched from afar when Rogelio, as he used to be known, had beat a kid behind the bleachers for calling him flaquito, a day-to-day recurrence the boy finally felt compelled to end. During the savage beatdown, he had hunched over and looked heavier, and flaquito Rogelio gave way to Hevee.

Hevee hunched over much like he did that day behind the bleachers, and he looked like a mountain of a man as the crowd’s taunts grew quieter. The blood-splattered man locked eyes with Julio, and Julio wished he had been glaring with righteous annoyance instead of murderous vengeance. As Julio imagined the number of broken bones it would take to get even for just one of Hevee’s, Hevee reminded him they weren’t in high school anymore. As adults, they didn’t have to resolve things through fists.

Wordlessly, Hevee reached behind his waist and pulled out a 45-caliber pistol that glimmered under the streetlights. He aimed it with a shaky hand at Julio, squeezed the trigger, and the blast reverberated through the intersection with a scratchy echo. The bullet ricocheted off the pavement and hit the driver’s window. As the broken glass rained down on the seat leather and street, the crowd scattered in a stampede of Cortezes and Vans. Stephanie disappeared into the departing crowd, which in their haste had left behind their tipped-over NOS canisters, broken 40oz bottles, and even a few smartphones still recording for the gram.

Hevee raised his pistol higher, and Julio unfroze from the shock and dove to the ground. He squeezed the trigger again, and the bullet lodged into the base of a streetlamp. The light flickered for a few seconds before shutting off, and under the shadow of the faulty lamp, Julio crawled into the driver’s seat of the Cavalier.

He started the car and looked over at the Cipitio, who had flopped his hat over his ears to muffle the noise of the gunshots. “Get in the car, damnit!” Julio yelled.

In the side-view mirror, Julio saw a deranged, bloodied Hevee marching like the Terminator to his car. He steadied his aim with both hands on his pistol, and the bullet cracked the mirror dead center. The Cipitio looked at Hevee, cried in fright, and Hevee’s watch sizzled a scalding red. In pain, Hevee fumbled to unclasp the watch from his wrist, and the Cipitio climbed into the passenger seat. Julio mashed the pedal, and the battered pony neighed with the might of a stallion. Hevee tossed the watch before emptying out his clip. Glass shattered all over the Cavalier until they finally turned a corner and out of sight.

On the giant, empty boulevard, the leftover adrenaline in Julio bristled as they barreled down the straightaway. He thumped his palms against the steering wheel while muttering fuck fuck fuck to himself before yelling it at the top of his voice. Each blow against the steering wheel synced to another fuck scraping from his throat until he heard a squishy rumbling beneath the car. The steering wheel stiffened, and he dug into it until his knuckles turned white. He howled a final, raspy fuck before relenting and veering off to the curb.

As Julio looked over to park, he saw the Cipitio had folded his hat in his hands and sat perfectly still. His mangy locks of curly hair had blotted some slick oily substance on the back of his seat. The droop in the kid-creature’s eyes and shoulders alarmed him. He was used to the puffed-out, childish gallantry of a being who could not suffer from any consequences. The Cipitio held more power than non-Salvadorans knew, and even Julio had never seen anything like what had happened to Hevee’s watch before. He had figured any bullets would have either curved around or bounced off the devil’s spawn, but he hadn’t considered the poor, mangled child didn’t know that himself. The Cipitio’s fear and guilt made him look like a lost child in a grocery store, which he was, albeit on an eldritch level. As he dangled the toes on his backward feet against the seat adjustment bar, Julio realized he was still more kid than creature.

“I’m sorry,” Julio said, shifting into park.

His fingers lingered on the key in the ignition, and he twisted it slowly to put the pony to sleep. Julio stepped out onto the boulevard and looked at his car. On top of the damage of the crash, the shots had riddled it with bullet holes, shattered every piece of glass, and punctured the left tire. He considered the number of scams it would take to restore the car, and he quickly axed the idea. Besides the pony, he had lost his streak. The other guys could take their beat ponies just to crash them all over again, but Julio—putting aside there was a man who tried to kill him minutes ago—couldn’t stomach entering the pit again after losing face, even only once. Julio had loved his Cavalier, when he thought it would always be perfect, when he thought he would always be perfect. As he appraised the mutilated pony with barely a hoof to stand on, he knew that love had always been conditional.

The Cipitio, perched on top of a street electrical box, asked, “What are you gonna do now?”

Julio squatted on the sidewalk and stared at the pony’s corpse. “Call up 2Good,” he said. “He knows a chop shop. I gotta cut my losses.”

He rubbed his stiff shoulder and said, “I really am sorry that things got hectic tonight. You were right about this takeover thing. Those foos were only ever there to clown me.”

Julio noticed an uneven splotch of wax just above a constellation of bullet holes. He rubbed the wax, sighed and said, “I gotta get my shit tighter.”

He stood up, and he looked eye to eye with the Cipitio swinging his deformed feet off the electrical box. The Cipitio patted a chubby set of fingers on Julio’s shoulder, smearing a hefty streak of grime and mucus on his shirt. “It’s okay, compa,” the Cipitio said.

“What about you?” Julio asked. “Anything you wanna say?”

“Huh,” the Cipitio said. “Like what?”

“Like … sorry,” Julio said. “You’re sorry too, right?”

The Cipitio pointed at himself, as if there might’ve been someone else behind him. “Me, sorry?” he asked. “For what?”

Julio grimaced, and he would’ve tipped the kid-creature off the box, if not for the fear he might turn a piece of his own jewelry scalding red.

“I told you not to whistle in the car!” Julio said. “Nobody human can stand that shit. How are you not sorry?”

The Cipitio stared at him blankly and said, “But you said I couldn’t turn on the radio.”

Julio muttered to himself of course. He turned around and pulled out his phone to call 2Good. On the way to the chop shop, they could resolve to give up scamming, this time for real. While they watched the shop tear apart the once-precious pony, they could hash out the business plan 2Good always lobbied for. They would first have to figure out what exactly the business was, but the prospect of a life less exciting than tonight enticed Julio. As 2Good answered with a groggy fuck you want, Julio turned back to the electrical box and saw the Cipito had disappeared. No matter how many times he did this, Julio couldn’t help himself. He scanned up and down the boulevard for him, on the off chance he could catch him running off to torment another Salvi somewhere else. He shook his head, knowing better than to look for a trace of the boy.