Neon Shards on Slauson

The court behind the shuttered elementary school wasn’t much. Two busted hoops, chain-link fences sagging like tired shoulders, asphalt cracked into a map of places no one wanted to go. Stray dogs padded along the edges, sniffing at chip bags and broken bottles. Shoes dangled from the power lines, swinging like trophies no one claimed. But when the streetlights hummed on—two working, three dead, one flickering red—the place became an arena.

The Cracks’ arena.

They weren’t much of a team either. Dented helmets, sticks taped together from scraps, rollerblades borrowed, stolen, or rusting. But they had Catalina, Kit Kat, quick as a match flare and twice as stubborn.

And they had the glass.

It had been a bottle once. Modelo, someone said. Maybe Heineken. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that when it shattered against the blacktop one night years ago, one shard refused to dull. Someone picked it up, tried to throw it out, but the thing clung. Smooth edges, but never safe, like it wanted to be kept. So they made it theirs.

No puck, no problem.

The Cracks had the shard.

Every game began the same. Catalina pulled the glass from her shoelace pouch, lifted it high so the streetlight caught it, spraying green fire across the cracked asphalt. Each player kissed their fingers, touched the shard, whispered something no one else could hear.

A curse.

A prayer.

A secret.

Tonight, Catalina held it longer than usual. It pressed cold against her palm, humming faintly like a live wire. She whispered into it—Don’t take my brother, not yet. She felt the glass twitch, or maybe it was just her pulse bouncing back at her.

She dropped it to the

center circle chalked in

faded spray paint.

The Cracks swarmed to

their places.

The ritual was done.

The game could begin.

The first face-off was chaos, always. The glass skittered across asphalt, sparking like flint. The Cracks’ blades roared, rubber wheels grinding the court. Catalina darted after it, her lungs full of heat, her veins alive with rhythm. Every slap of the shard against her stick echoed like a drumbeat.

They weren’t supposed to win. Half their team was half-broken already, braces on knees, ribs wrapped from fights. But the glass had other plans. Every bounce, every ricochet, bent toward their sticks. When Catalina snapped a shot at the goal, the shard curved in midair, hissing into the net like it had wings.

Cheers erupted. A stray dog howled along, tail thumping. Somewhere above, a helicopter cut across the sky, spotlight briefly flaring over the court. For a moment, Catalina swore it wasn’t light but green fire pouring down.

The Cracks played harder. Sweating, swearing, grinning with busted teeth. Each slam of the glass sounded sharper, more alive. Streetlight reflections crawled across the asphalt, bending around the shard, making shapes Catalina didn’t want to name—shadows playing a second game just beneath their feet.

At halftime, they collapsed onto the benches. Catalina cradled the shard in her palm, watching it glow faintly, as though it had swallowed the light whole.

“You hear it too, right?”

whispered Jonah, the

goalie.

His mask was taped

together in three places,

one eye blackened from last

week’s brawl.

“Hear what?” Catalina

asked, though she knew.

“The hum.” He leaned close,

sweat dripping off his chin.

“Like it’s… singing.”

Catalina closed her fist

around the shard.

The hum traveled up her

wrist, into her teeth.

She smiled with blood-raw

gums.

“Yeah,” she said. “I hear it.”

And when they pushed off for the second half, the shard glowed brighter, as though it had heard her too.

They didn’t lose. Not once. At first it was a joke—The Cracks don’t crack. Then it became something heavier, a weight pressing on their backs. No matter who they played, no matter how busted their skates or broken their sticks, the glass puck bent toward victory. It darted through gaps too narrow, ricocheted off curbs at impossible angles, threaded itself into the net like it wanted to be there all along. Catalina’s hands shook when she touched it, as though it wasn’t hers to hold but hers to keep alive.

The neighborhood noticed. Kids who used to laugh at them now came to watch. Graffiti started popping up on the court walls:

THE GLASS CHOSE THEM. WIN OR BLEED.

One night, after another sweep, a rival team swarmed the fence, throwing rocks and trash. Someone grabbed the glass mid-play, trying to pocket it. Catalina tackled him, teeth bared, ripping the shard back with both hands. It cut his palm deep, cleaner than any knife. But instead of blood, shimmering liquid spilled out, glowing faintly like antifreeze, neon-green and wrong. It soaked into the asphalt, vanishing before anyone could speak. The boy staggered back, hand smoking, and disappeared into the crowd.

The Cracks didn’t stop playing. Couldn’t. The shard hissed against Catalina’s stick, begging her to keep skating. And she did.

Catalina started carrying the puck everywhere. Wrapped in a shoelace pouch around her neck, under her pillow at night, tucked against her ribs in school. She dreamed of it glowing under water, of glass corridors stretching into infinity, her reflection skating just ahead with a stick, always scoring, never stopping.

Her brother noticed.

“Kit Kat,” he muttered one

morning, bleary-eyed at the

kitchen table, “you’re

talking to yourself again.”

“I’m not.”

She clutched the pouch.

“I’m talking to it.”

He didn’t ask what it was. In South Central, you don’t ask. You just pray it doesn’t take her too.

The more they played, the stranger things grew. Streetlights flickered in rhythm with the game, blinking on every slap shot, dimming when the shard hit the net. Helicopters circled lower, their spotlights splitting into fractured beams when they hit the puck—like stained glass exploding across the court. Stray dogs lined the fences, howling in eerie unison, their eyes glowing faintly with the same green as the glass.

During one game, the asphalt itself seemed to shift. Cracks widened, curling like veins, glowing faint beneath the surface. When Catalina skated hard, she swore the wheels sank a millimeter into something softer than stone, like she was rolling on skin.

The team didn’t care.

They played harder, faster,

desperate.

Winning was everything.

Winning was survival.

Winning was proof they

weren’t nothing.

It happened late one night after a blowout game. Catalina was holding the shard too tightly, blood slick on her palm from where it had kissed her skin. A fissure crept across the glass, hairline but real, like the beginnings of a spiderweb. She froze. For a moment, she thought it would crumble, leave them with nothing but dust.

Instead, light leaked out—soft at first, then blinding. Inside wasn’t glass at all but something moving, pressing against the fracture from the other side. A shimmer like water. A swarm of eyes, tiny, frantic, all staring outward.

Catalina’s stomach

dropped.

She nearly threw it away.

But the glass whispered,

Don’t.

Or maybe it just hummed

louder.

She wrapped it tighter in its pouch, pressing it to her chest. Her teammates didn’t ask about the crack. They didn’t want to know.

After that, the shard started cutting them intentionally. Small slices during passes, strange burns on their hands when they slapped it too hard. Each time, the asphalt drank the blood and glowed faintly beneath their wheels.

Jonah, the goalie, came off the court once with no shadow. Just gone, vanished, as though the glass had claimed it as payment. He laughed about it, said it made him faster. No one laughed with him.

Another kid swore he saw a girl in the reflections of the shard—his sister, dead two summers ago. He started showing up early, whispering longer before every game, begging the shard to let him see her again.

The rituals shifted.

They stopped being secrets

or prayers.

They became offerings.

Sacrifices.

Catalina whispered away her heartbeat one night. Just for one game. She skated without breath, without pulse, the shard thrumming in her hands like it had taken her place.

They won by twenty.

When the game ended, her chest hurt. It took an hour before her heart remembered to beat again. She didn’t tell the others. She didn’t tell her brother. She only pressed the shard harder against her chest and whispered, I’ll give you anything, just don’t leave us.

And for the first time, she

thought she heard it

whisper back.

The shard wanted more. It started subtle. A slice here, a burn there. Then it began taking pieces of them whole. Jonah never got his shadow back. Manny’s voice cracked mid-game and never returned—every word he tried to speak came out as static, like the helicopter hum above the court.

Still, they kept playing. They had to. The court was no longer just asphalt; it was a living thing, groaning under their wheels. The cracks glowed green, pulsing in time with the shard. Each pass of the puck left streaks of light, as though they were carving neon graffiti into the night itself.

Catalina could feel it steering her stick, tugging her wrists, demanding shots she hadn’t meant to take. Her muscles obeyed anyway.

The games grew longer. Hours passed, then whole nights. They stopped keeping score. The shard scored itself, dragging them into a rhythm that drowned out everything else.

One night, the asphalt finally gave way. The cracks yawned wide, glowing veins spreading into chasms. Through them, Catalina saw another court, glimmering beneath like a mirror made of ice. On it skated shadows of themselves—skeleton-kids in battered gear, faces blurred, jaws broken, eyes lit neon. Every move The Cracks made up top, the reflections echoed below, slightly delayed, like they were trying to catch up.

When the glass puck bounced into one of the cracks, it didn’t come back up. Instead, its reflection rose from below—bigger, sharper, still glowing with that swarm of frantic eyes.

The kids didn’t stop. They bent lower, swiping at the glowing shards rising from the undercourt. They played both sides of the reflection, desperate not to let the glass fall silent.

The rituals shifted again.

They weren’t whispers

anymore.

They were sacrifices.

One boy smeared blood

across the shard before

every face-off.

Another burned his

sneakers in the center

circle, wheels melting,

smoke curling into a halo.

Manny, still mute, carved

symbols into his own arms

with broken stick splinters,

letting the shard drink the

blood before the game.

Catalina gave it her dreams. She slept without rest, eyes open, heart jittering in time with the shard’s pulse. When she closed her lids, she skated glass corridors, never stopping, lungs full of green fire.

Her brother begged her to

quit.

“Kit Kat, it’s not saving you

—it’s eating you.”

But she only laughed, glass

tucked under her shirt.

“We don’t lose. We don’t

stop.”

The whole neighborhood bent around the games. Streetlights no longer flickered—they glowed solid green, bathing the court in eerie halos. The stray dogs lined the fence each night, rows of glowing eyes tracking every move, tongues lolling, drool burning holes into the asphalt. Helicopters circled so low their rotors stirred the court dust into cyclones. From their spotlights poured not white light but stained-glass beams, fractured into prisms, painting the kids like saints on fire. Sirens became hymns, wailing in key with the shard’s hum.

Catalina spun, hair sticking to her face, stick sparking with every slap. She felt weightless, hollow, filled only with the shard’s rhythm. The court wasn’t asphalt anymore. It was glass—smooth, endless, reflecting not the kids but others.

The others pressed against the reflection like trapped fish, eyes too wide, hands slapping the glass. Some were familiar—kids from the neighborhood long gone, lost to bullets or cells. Catalina saw her cousin, mouth open, begging silently through the glass. She skated harder to drown it out.

During one game, the shard cracked fully in Catalina’s hands. A fissure spiderwebbed across it, spilling light so bright the whole court froze.

Inside wasn’t glass anymore. Inside was a cathedral. A jagged, endless cathedral made of shards and blood. Stained-glass windows flickered with scenes of every game they’d ever played, every whisper, every offering. The pews were filled with shadows. The altar was the shard itself.

Catalina fell to her knees.

She pressed her forehead

to the shard, whispering,

“Don’t leave us. I’ll give you

anything.”

It whispered back, clear

this time:

Give me everything

She lifted her head. Her team was already obeying. Jonah skated until his wheels split and his legs bled. Manny collapsed, carving more symbols into his chest with broken glass. The others screamed and laughed and wept, their blood painting the court into a glowing map of veins. Catalina clutched the shard, chest hollow. She realized the truth: the shard wasn’t their tool.

They were the shard’s

game.

And it had no plan to end.

The reflection court split fully open, and the shadow-players poured upward. They weren’t ghosts—they were what came after ghosts. Skeletal bodies with glass where their eyes should be, skating with sticks made of bone and fire.

The Cracks didn’t hesitate. They played against them, with them, alongside them. The shard hummed loud as a siren, dragging Catalina’s arms, bending her wrists, making her score again and again. Blood streaked the glass. Shadows roared approval.

She couldn’t stop.

None of them could.

The game was forever.

The shard split in two.

Not broken—never broken—but doubled. Twin jagged halves glowing with the same swarm of eyes, the same hum that shook Catalina’s teeth. She clutched them both, fingers shredded, blood soaking her palms until she couldn’t tell where flesh ended and glass began.

The court was gone now. No more asphalt, no more sagging fences. Only glass underfoot, stretching forever, refracting their bodies into infinite fragments. Each step Catalina took left shards behind, blooming like flowers across the rink.

Her teammates skated ahead, or maybe behind, or maybe inside the glass itself. Their faces blurred, flickering in and out of shape, sometimes kids she knew, sometimes strangers she’d only ever seen in graffiti murals or memorial candles on street corners. Their laughter cracked like broken bottles.

Catalina kept playing. She had no lungs, no heartbeat—she’d given those up long ago. But her body moved with the rhythm, faster, sharper, a blade carving patterns into the rink. The shard sang through her blood, every slap of stick against glass echoing into the infinite cathedral.

And she knew then: this was the only thing left.

No Cracks.

No rivals.

No South Central.

No brother waiting at

home.

Only the game, endless,

fever-bright, bodies

dissolving into reflections

until there was no

difference between player

and glass.

Her palms opened. The shards fused into her chest, right where her heart should have been. A burst of green light exploded outward, swallowing the court, swallowing the team, swallowing her name.

The rink sealed over. From the outside, just another cracked blacktop behind a dead school. From the inside, a cathedral of glass, forever echoing with the sound of blades cutting, sticks clashing, voices howling.

Catalina was gone.

But Kit Kat would never

stop skating.