"Two friends two friends, how close could they get without being one man ... one in love with a ghost, the other ... longed for the son who'd more than likely already become a ghost." Ruben Arenal, nicknamed Rocket by his close friends and family, and Ernesto Cisneros are longtime friends, as close as brothers, living in Mexico's northern state of Chihuahua. Ruben is a potter who lives alone in his studio apartment. Ernesto is married to Guadalupe and they have one son, Coyuco, who is training to be a teacher. Out of these bald facts spins magic. Ruben falls in love with an eerily lifelike mannequin in a shop window, widely rumored to be more flesh and bone than mere artifice and modelled on a local beauty nicknamed La Pascualita, who died young many decades ago. Ruben trails after her ghost while Ernesto leaves their hometown to go in search of his son, kidnapped and disappeared by the police while out on a student protest with forty-two of his comrades from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College.