The night was a neon blur of spinning reds and blues. Shouting, sirens, the hiss of breaks and the roar of engines filled the air and felt like narrow shards of glass stabbing into her face.

“Daddy!” Taani’s everything ached. She rolled to one side and arched her long neck down to run her fingers through her bright pink mane. It was stiff with gel and other things. Her rough fingertips passed over a cut. “Daddy!”

She knew it was stupid to call him. He’d been gone for ten years and no amount of bawling was going to bring him back. It didn’t stop her from wanting him though.

The giraffe tried to stand and found one of her heels had gone missing. Her skirt that could barely be called a skirt was deeply stained from the gash on her hip. She couldn’t see straight. The corners of her eyes were puffy and crusted with the double dollar rocks she’d ground and sprinkled into them earlier that night. They called it stardust. It made your wishes come true.

Where was that wailing coming from? What were those lights? Taani used the hood of a car to guide herself. Heat rolled off her fur and tried to tug the air from her runny nose. She couldn’t breathe in or out. Choker after choker and necklace after necklace was tugged off and shed like snakeskin as she stumped towards the pulsing lights. They looked like the dance floor. Her pounding head was the thumping music. The sirens, her favorite singer. She’d taken a tumble. That was all.

Ma’am. Taani snorted bitterly and coughed phlegm from her long throat. Ma’am was what you called old women. Taani was not old! She hadn’t a grey hair in her tail.

The policeman slicked his ears back and shook his head. Another space case. He refused to let go and called over some more blobs. It took two wolves and a boar to get the woman seated. She swore at them the entire time and insisted on getting back up because somebody was waiting for her at the counter. The boar in bright yellow leaned up to shine his penlight in her eyes. One of the wolves drilled her for questions that he got no answers to. The other rubbed the soft spots under her eyes and barked commands into a small wrist radio.

Her huge, hoop-heavy ears swiveled around, trying desperately to scoop up any stray notes of the song she’d been swaying to less than an hour ago. Enormous, hazy eyes struggled to focus on anything that wasn’t the flashing lights of the police cars. Her stomach clenched. With a groan, she leaned over and vomited, accidentally on purpose, onto the emergency kit the boar had abandoned in favor of skunk that had surfaced from the rubble.

“Stupid.” She spat in attempts to get rid of the taste of that fruity little Rocket Bomb Whatever with the umbrella. It didn’t taste as good the second time down. Her eyes burned. Now her throat burned. Sound began to fall in strings from the ball of static and noise that had been surrounding her. She could pick words that were shouted more than three feet away from her apart from one another. Some of the words, Taani noticed, were not words at all. They were gulping sobs. The squeal of static and the shrill call of sirens untwined. No one was singing. She could sort out the hiss of engines from the hiss of…

Taani squinted and discovered a light she had missed completely. It came from a billowing flame that all but swallowed the building she’d stumped away from. It grew up between shattered siding like wild, red weeds and licked greedily at the tilting telephone poles. There was a gaping hole in one corner of the structure that dropped down into what used to be the basement like a yawning mouth lined with jagged, vinyl teeth. Streams of water arced through the air and lashed at the tongues, keeping them contained where they would starve and dwindle.

Heat rolled and carried the smell of twisting, dripping plastic, harsh chemicals, and fur with it. Taani gagged a second time but nothing came up. Then, her vision sharpened long enough for her to see them. She recoiled and tried to hide her face in her space blanket but it was too late. The image was seared into the backs of her eyeballs. Motionless dancers littered the lot. Some of them had ended up in two places at once. Taani bleated and clapped her hands over her ears.

She had left Sonny and Eri’s place at seven. She had parked by eight and was on the floor with everyone else by eight thirty. Everything beyond that was a brightly colored whirl of noise, cheap food, and Denooi not shutting up about the new lights he’d had installed. Taani thought they were stupid. They gave her a headache. She was too old for all this pulsing, disco revival trapezoid print bullshit. She just wanted to get dusted and laid. The battered ghost of a memory skulked the far walls of her mind. An argument she heard coming from the bottom of the stairs after failing to find the bathroom for the third time.

Taani slowly arched her neck back around to look at the fire. She refused to let her gaze wander to the concrete below. Her eyes were locked on the unfocused wavering pillar of orange that reached up into the night. The stardust still had its talons in the edges of her consciousness and was scrambling wildly to pull her back down. It only succeeded in giving her a strange mental image as she watched.

The tips of the topmost flames looked, for all the world, like grubby infant arms with stumpy searching fingers. It fluctuated and heaved as a smaller explosion drifted up from the basement. A cry. Why would the sky not pick it up? Why would the stars not reach down to uproot the ruined, wailing mess of lights and shed clothing and coddle it to their celestial breast?

Fat salty drops left dark makeup lines down Taani’s slender snout. They washed away a stamped-on star that belonged on a giraffe years younger than her. Her ears fell flush with her ruined mane as she pulled the blanket up around her shoulders. Carefully, she reached up and wiped at both her eyes with her knuckles and peered blearily down at the powder and smudged mascara that coated them. Every fine, wonder-filled crystal caught the dancing fire light and made her stiffening fur alive with more stars than the heavens above her could ever hope to hold.

She stared into this new galaxy for hours until the falling tears dissolved all the lights within it. When she realized what was happening, she choked out a sob that was so sharp and sudden that it startled her. She didn’t want them gone! She wanted to look into them forever! If she looked long enough, maybe Daddy would be there. She would find him looking back, arms out, beckoning her to come sit at the table by him. He would smile and ruffle her ears and tell her what a silly girl she was. He would pick on her for being short and ask her to tell him his favorite story about when they had all flown to the city of Jazz because she won that lottery. Only she’d never told him there had never been a lottery.

All she could smell was the harsh chemical afterbirth that brought these tiny diamonds into the world. It rode the flames and crept out into the streets to lap against doors and worm through windows cracked in the summer heat. Everyone with half a nose would know what had happened before the sun finished rising.

She watched the flames creep back into the building and the lab below. She watched ambulances scream away into the night. She watched the cop cars and the spectators thin. By some amazing and bizarre twist of fate, she and her space blanket had been forgotten. Finally clearheaded enough to be thankful for this small blessing, Taani kicked off her other heel and disappeared into the city.