"If you get burn, take the clothes with your hand. Leave the mold and then wipe yourself," says Arturo. It strikes me that in this step I get a warning when minutes earlier, while I was putting my fingers into the boiling syrup, there was plenty of laughter. "It is at "cry" temperature, as my father used to say," Antonio jokes, and the laughter lifts the tension that was forming on my back after the warning. "Once I really burned myself. I was about his age," and points to his son. "At home, there are no burners like in here; you place bricks and the burner is built upwards. The upper row is tied up with some wire. Then I started to play, the wire broke, the bucket tilted and it burned me here –he touches the outer side of his right arm– it fell on top of my shirt. Fortunately I had no scar. It peeled off, I got a scab, but nothing else happened," and the man uncovers his sleeve to confirm his statement. "They are burns similar to hot plastic," Arturo tells me as he shows me his right arm full of small scars. "Look, the burns. In fact, this one is recent," he points at the left corner of his mouth, showing a small sore. After a couple of minutes, the syrup hardens. Then Antonio and his son take a table knife and start scraping the solidified sugar that was left in the edge of the mold for the base of the sugar skull to remain even and smooth. I do the same. The caramel falls and is inevitable to take a little bit with your hands and put it in your mouth. It is not cloying sweet, it's soft because it's still wet, you can barely taste the lemon, but it neutralizes the sugar flavor. It's addictive, and in between scraping a mold and the other, I start eating all the pieces that fall on the table. And it seems that it's a normal reaction within the confectioners' world. "I love sugar," Arturo tells me, almost drooling while saying these words, his voice becomes slow, he closes his eyes and has a smirk. It is evident that he is eating pieces of candy in his mind. "Everything you do, you try it and you like it", he says with the enthusiasm of a child. "Interestingly, my dad was a diabetic, but he needed his everyday treat". "Sweets were his antidote," says Antonio, laughing. Then it's time to take the skull out of the clay. I take one of the pieces and remove the rubber band that joined the two parts of the mold. I stir one side a little and it exposes the parietal and other parts of the skull on the right side. It is still wet, but the sugar is already firm and solid. I remove the sugar skull carefully to release it from the other piece of clay. "If you hold it from the edge, it will break. Grab all of it. Like this," Antonio instructs me. It seems like I'm helping out at an animal break an egg at birth. It's exciting. Finally the clay is off and the piece is out. The sugar water makes it shine with the light. This thick-lipped sugar skull is jawless. I feel joy in my chest, satisfaction. Maybe that is how veterinarians feel when they help female