We Are All the Same in the Dark

by Julia Heaberlin

I have no idea how life will spool forward if I don’t turn this girl in, but I know exactly how it will if I do. The town will finally strap Wyatt Branson to a pyre and drop a match.

“I wouldn’t say she’s free,” he says, after a second.

“You need to ask what you’ve always wanted to ask,” Wyatt says. “Which is whether I killed True.”

Trouble at the Branson place. That’s the anonymous call my daddy said he picked up at the station on June 7, 2005.

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.”

She is why I still exist, which is exactly why I need to find out why she no longer does.

The old lady tells me that when I’m a bride, the only thing I should want thrown at me is money.

Life is never yours. You are just renting it out while the landlord in the sky ups the price until you can’t pay anymore.

“Was something buried here?” I spit out. “Something important?” “Yes,” he says. “There was. Never ask that question again. There’s a price for being curious.”

We are all the same in the dark. My mother said that to me when she kissed me good night. She meant that in the dark, all that’s left is our souls.

I tap out a match from a box on the stove, strike it against one of the old burners, and watch God’s words go up in flames. That’s when I remember what 70X7 means.

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