We Were the Princes of Broken Things
We are the ghosts of our city, the children left behind by the headlines and the body counts. We were told fairy tales in school about princes, warriors, and tigers, but our reality was a story written in gunfire and shadows. We learned early that in our world, you forget you are a prince when the monsters outside come to get you.
For Estrella, the world shattered during a lesson on fairy tales. As the teacher spoke of three wishes, the pop-pop-pop of a gunfight sent them all to the floor. In that moment of terror, her teacher pressed a piece of chalk into her hand and whispered, “Three wishes”. That was the day Estrella’s life split in two—the one before, where her mother was simply late coming home, and the one after, where she was an orphan armed with impossible magic.
Her first wish, whispered in the lonely silence of her empty house, was for her mother to return. And in a way, she did. Not as the warm, living woman she remembered, but as a haunting presence, a ghost who warned her, “Go away”. This was how Estrella met us. We were a small pack of boys, led by a hardened child named Shine, who had already accepted the brutal rules of the street. To us, another mouth to feed was a liability. Girls, we believed, were bad luck.
But Estrella was different. She had a fierceness born of fresh grief. Shine, who carried the only picture of his own lost mother on a stolen phone, saw a flicker of himself in her. He challenged her to earn her place: kill the man who took her mother, a ruthless gang member named Caco. So she took the gun, marched to the killer’s door, and spent her second wish: that she wouldn’t have to kill him. She returned to us a hero, claiming she had done the deed.
For a while, we were a real family. We found an abandoned mansion and made it our kingdom, a “Boingland of the dark-skinned kids,” as one of us called it. We created our own fairy tales. Shine told stories of an escaped tiger that roamed the streets, hungry for parentless children—a monster to explain the monsters we already knew. We were the kings of this broken place, drawing tigers on our shirts for protection because, as Estrella wrote in her notebook, tigers are not afraid.
But the real monsters—the Huascas gang, led by the politician they called “El Chino”—were hunting for the phone Shine carried, the one with a video that could ruin their leader. They found us, and in the chaos, they took Morro, the youngest of our pack, the one who never spoke.
That’s when the lies unraveled. Chino himself called, revealing he was the one who had killed Caco. He had our little brother, and he wanted his phone. Shine had no choice but to make a deal. But deals with monsters are always traps. Shine was murdered, another ghost joining the whispers that followed Estrella.
Left alone, with only one wish remaining, Estrella finally understood what she had to do. The ghosts of her mother, of Shine, and now of Morro all begged her for the same thing: “Bring him to us”. She knew she couldn’t rely on magic. There are no tigers, Shine had told her, there is nothing but us. We are the only things there is.
Armed with this terrible truth, Estrella made her final stand. She led El Chino into a trap, a final confrontation in the ruins of our city. She didn’t need magic to be a warrior. She just needed to remember who she was.
We are the children who survived. We learned that fairy tales are true, not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten. We are princes of this kingdom of broken things. We are warriors. And we are tigers. And tigers are not afraid.