We Are All the Same in the Dark

by Julia Heaberlin

It takes about eight to ten hours to hand-dig a grave, more if you was doing it in the dark. Five to six if you have a helper. It ain’t like the movies. You need more than just a spade with a good blade. You need a chainsaw for splitting the roots. A pick. Even if you don’t hit rocks, you got Texas clay, which can be as bad as rocks. I always carry a measuring tape and a yardstick, because you’ve got to make a hole a lot bigger than in your mind’s eye. And you’ve got to go deep enough that folks and animals walking by can’t smell the body rotting. I’d go eighteen inches of soil on top to be safe. Bottom line, if you’re asking me my opinion, I don’t think that Branson girl will ever be found. I never saw anything like the search for her body. Every farm. Every bit of lake property. The cops got a color-coded map and took it inch by inch, year by year, until it was all done. I’ll tell you this: If that girl was buried around here, and buried fast, she was buried by someone who knows his dirt. That might be a farmer. That might be a person who’s killed a lot. —Albert Jenkins, 66, cemetery gravedigger Excerpt from The Tru Story crime documentary

Don’t touch. Don’t touch. You’ll catch it. 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.

“Kale is bad for my tummy,” Lola confirms. “It tastes like sh—”

I love this small child 😂

Loving dark men is a seesaw. They never tell you everything. You always wonder if the tiny red spot on a shirt is really from a spaghetti dinner like they claim. But then they put a bird back in a nest. They pull a drowning kid out of the water. And that’s all it takes. The spaghetti is not blood.

The avengers outside are the worst kind, the ones in silver cross necklaces, baseball caps, and Life is Good T-shirts. The ones who stay up until midnight to build their first-graders’ Alamo projects out of sugar cubes, cancel a Thanksgiving cruise to bring Grandma some turkey in the hospital, spend a full paycheck on ACL surgery for the family dog. Their love for God and family is just as manic as their hate.

The record playing right now outside this jail cell is “Amazing Grace.” The crowd has rolled into a rousing version that is leaking through every crack in the walls. My uncle told me that a slave trader wrote that hymn in the 1700s. The man was an obscene human being most of his life, maybe all of it. But it doesn’t matter. We worship that song. Our souls are saved with it. We sing it to bury our dead.

It’s like everything else: The whole dark truth is drowned out by a catchy melody.

No mention of his release because his victim, Georgia Cox, had already faded, just another of the three women a day in America snuffed out by an intimate partner.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” the old lady asks me. “The empty face representing their unfinished lives and unexplained disappearance? The crown representing Trumanell’s near-goddess status in this town and her deep love of nature? The wings representing Odette’s courage and her freedom to soar now that she no longer needs two legs?”

People don’t understand that words can rape.

Why do men have to kill beautiful things?

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