This is a summer project that I'm working on for the writing club at my school. We picked a random country, and now we're supposed to do as we will with it for two months. Mine's Mexico, and I'm still researching some of the historical details, so input is very welcome.

Note on the title- Only Angels Have Wings is the film that Rita Hayworth got her big break in. Rita Hayworth, for some reason or another, is going to be a recurring theme in this story (Damnit, Stephen King! Stop influencing everything I write!). Believe me, I was not trying for corny when I came up with this title.

Chapter One

It was 1939.

For anyone who cares, this is what had come to pass in 1938-

- Our oil industry had nationalized

- Because of the ongoing Spanish Civil War, refugees from afflicted Spain started to arrive in Mexico.

- Marguerita Cansino was still dreaming in black and white.

1939 was far more noteable-

- The Spanish Civil War ended on April Fool's Day.

- The continent of Europe went insane for a second time, possibly from in-breeding.

- Rita Hayworth was an up-and-coming star on a sky as substantial as flickering light and paper.

1939 was a big year for everyone.

To start the story properly, I have to go to a decrepit old cinema, one that let in sunlight and had rats in the seats. When the projector was turned on, moths would cast amorphous shadows on the screen before slowly disappearing as we (the audience) were drawn into the illusion. In retrospect, I wonder why the moths didn't gather over the projector and blot out the movie, but then again I've always thought too much.

La Grande was a tiny cinema on the outskirts of Mexico City. For all intents and purposes, it was closed down, but for a closed down theatre it was in better order than some of the well-maintained ones in the city. True, la Grande was badly in need of a janitor who didn't cause more mess than he cleaned, and her projector was notoriously unreliable. But the fact remained that somehow the proprietors got their hands on reels of new movies, and so everyone overlooked the cinema's obvious shortcomings.

I had started going to la Grande after my mother's death. I worked at the clinic a few blocks away, and I was delighted to find that I could catch the end of a film early in the morning before starting my shift. For the rest of the day, I would work backwards from the end, establish the characters and imagine how they got to their happy ending. By the time I got to see the movie in full, though, it never ceased to amaze me that no matter how many scenarios I had come up with, the story was always drastically different.

A few weeks after I started going to la Grande, the cinema gained an usher.

He was the most useless usher in the history of cinema. Though he kept his powder-blue uniform pressed and pristine, the rest of his conduct was shameful. Few people who frequented the theatre needed help finding a seat, but on the off-chance they did, they were better off asking the people on the screen for help than the usher, who would have by now been sitting by the door, enraptured with the unfolding drama. He was clumsy, ludicrously so, and was so incredibly pale that he actually seemed to give off light in the darkened theatre, or at least steal some of the sunlight that was leaking through holes in the walls.

Nobody really noticed him except for me, to tell the truth. Perhaps he would have been more helpful if people had actually been asking him for assistance. When I thought about it hard enough, it seemed a little sad that he should take such good care of his uniform, and yet nobody really took note of him.

So one day, out of pure sympathy, I decided to ask for his help.