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Xochitl was sitting inside, in front of the television, and her life was over.

She was sitting in a sort of a stunned pile between the cushions of the least-demolished half of the sofa, which she had pulled up against the TV to a dangerous red-green-blue-barred degree of nearness, and she was in a state of face-clutching horror. Only it wasn’t her face she was clutching. Well, not her normal face, anyway, but it was hers in that she’d made it, lovingly handcrafted it actually, on the old Singer sewing machine Nan’s friend had lent to her. This other face of hers was grey and blue and red, and it was composed of the cut-up remains two filched blouses and a bra, and it was sitting in her lap, clutched in a tendony fist.

“Rey Misterio Jr.,” Xo said, coldly, to the television. “I will never forgive you ever.” The TV, which lacked Xo’s highly developed emotional faculties, had moved on to a Haagen Dasz commercial, but Xo would not move on. No. Not even for Haagen Dasz.

Lately Shiva, Xo’s Nantli, had made vague flailings in the direction of Ethnic Heritage Enrichment, with her signature insensitive, borderline-insulting ineptitude – a few books ganked from the library with people in sombreros on their covers, a burrito dinner, a single avocado purchased from the store (which was still on the kitchen counter, softly rotting away – it was green, lumpy, and apparently unclassifiable as either fruit or vegetable and thus scared Shiva badly).

“Yeah, that is cool, Nan,” regularly said Xo, who was patently not-in-fact-Mexican-per-se. The only thing that applied, really, was the avocado, and frankly it frightened her too.

However despite Shiva’s liberal slatherings of semi-offensive stereotype, the effort was generally a noble one, until it became clear to her, one memorable afternoon, that Xo’s primary motivations in terms of Heritage were Nescafe con leche and televised lucha libre, often, quite dangerously, in conjunction. It appeared, when the dust had cleared, that cultural sensitivity really just was not on the menu in their household.

(The mask was the work of three afternoons of finger-perforated trial and error on the sewing machine, but the end result looked sort of awesome in its blank-eyed open-mouthed intimidatingness. It was not till she tried it on that Xo discovered, to her great distress, that generally luchadores did not have a giant mess of feathers on their heads, and so had not designed their masks with the needs of people with Xo’s brand of head-mess in consideration. After five minutes of seam-tearing force, she had just managed to get it, eyeholes and mouth-hole spewing with feathers like technicolor puke, about six inches away from her actual face. Undaunted, she went at it with scissors, removing the entire back of it and punching in holes for elastic bands – however, Xo really wasn’t a mask-smith, and the result of this had the unfortunate habit of collecting in weird perforated folds in her eye and mouth region, like a fetching cross between Hijo del Santo and Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th fame.)

Shiva, spooked at this coffee-infused, bemasked child her efforts had wrought, immediately had the household cable cancelled, but the damage was done: Xo was jonesin’, Xo needed her fix, and Xo knew where to go to fulfill her basic cable needs. The day Xo had discovered that the old television in the headquarters got Telemundo was a day of joy that was almost palpable - second only to today’s spiral into utter despair, as Xo watched Rey Misterio Jr. go down for the count one minute and forty six seconds into the two man tag team . She had come all the way out here, remembered her mask, and fasted for the last four hours so that she was all good and ornery for the match, and FOR WHAT. For WHAT, REY MISTERIO JR.?

Xo, in her pile and in her too-large stripey sweater, thought deeply about dragging herself outside and falling to her knees in the dirt and shaking her fists and screaming “POR QUEEE” to the heavens, but in her heart of hearts she knew that nobody around here would get it, anyway, and it would be a wasted gesture, and she didn’t even have the energy to explain the delicate world of the EMLL to friends and strangers and random frightened accosted passersby today. Such was the depth of her agony.

She settled for aiming miscellaneous kicks at the television until she managed to hit the power button with her toe, and with a moan dragged herself outside, all grand-gesture-free and miserable.

It was a crummy, grey, misty-a** day, anyway, perfect for stewing in recent defeat. If she had been a Raymond Chandler detective type, she would have smoked a cigarette, coldly. Instead, she planted her too-long sweater arms into her armpits and made a sort of angry huddle on the steps in front of the headquarters, her eyebrows down somewhere around her mouth.

From down the damp yard came the sudden screech of metal on… something. Xo’s eyes flickered up, her mouth went down, and the mask went on. She snapped the elastic against the back of her head, pinning feathers in all odd directions, and glowered through the eyeholes at the gazebo, at the smudge thing toiling in its depths. In the mask, her pupils narrowed, focused, and dilated suddenly.

Oh, holy crap. The whitey cobwebby hair, and the little glimmers of candycolor here and there. It wasn’t a smudge thing, it was the smudge thing. The one. But it looked awfully big. Like it had graduated to grand high smudge.

“Zoquiyo,” came Xo’s voice from somewhere inside the mask. “Holy cows.” She wobbled to her feet somehow, without removing her long sweater-arms from her armpits, and peered out toward the smudge thing’s craftsman’s labor, torn between butting bossily in on whatever it was the smudge thing was into and maintaining her current exquisite misery.

Xo’s very fancy handcrafted luchador mask had begun to slide down exclusively around her mouth, giving her the look of someone who was very concerned about SARS and not very concerned about not looking like a serial killer.