We Are All the Same in the Dark

by Julia Heaberlin

We both know the rules of bad luck by heart, and bad luck burns off this girl like a terrible flu. She caught it from someone else. That’s how bad luck works, a germ that travels as fast as it can from one of us to the next, hoping for a mortal wound, but happy with whatever it can get.

That good eye of hers is a flickering green jewel, powerful. It says she’s already made her choice. She’ll take her chances with a big guy like me in a truck rather than alone out here on this land with the gang of rattlesnakes and buzzards that run it.

She’d felt things she should never have to feel. I can see it in that big green eye, which has to hold double. She’s still hoping for her little piece of blue sky. Believing in magic circles, just in case it really works.

I take it as a warning she’s communicating with a higher power. Sweet breath wasted, honey. God hears you and me every day, and look where we are.

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

Natives often return, especially the ones who swear they never will. Texas is a beautiful poison you drink from your mother’s breast; the older you get and the farther you run, the more it pounds in your blood.

The truth is, I’m not brave. I’m not even that willing. I’m just more afraid of one thing happening than the other.

These girls believed their lives had more power, more meaning, if their identities were melted into myth and one another—the girls whose bones will never be found, and the ones not even born yet, who will walk the highways in their echo.

What terrible happened to you?

Watch the shadows. I tell the little kids who sit here, shadows scare most people. But they talk to people like us. The shadows will save your life.”

What’s coming is always unimaginable, and by that, I mean just that. It cannot be imagined. What’s coming never acts or behaves the way we think it will.”

It’s funny the things I can’t remember until I stop trying so hard to remember them. Until I let my mind fly on its own.

I say that strangers are powerful. They can mark you in twenty seconds. They can rob you at gunpoint so you never feel safe again. They can mention you’re pretty at a party when no one else ever has, and then you don’t kill yourself that day or maybe any other day. It’s like a diamond tossed out a car window you were lucky enough to catch.

She knows I lived in a trailer park where most people never even heard of the Louvre, but where there’s no faster education on earth. Take away an eye, and you get a Ph.D. Add a year in a group home with pissed-off girls who feel like thrown-away Kleenex, and it’s a study abroad on every planet in the universe.

“A wish…is just hope,”

I tell myself what I always tell myself. Pick the best of your bad choices. Survive this moment.

We are all the same in the dark.

She meant that in the dark, all that’s left is our souls.

We’re members of the Bad Childhood Club. We don’t push. We don’t need details or proof.

Money is everything. It is life. It is happiness. It is the kind of blind I want to be.