We Are All the Same in the Dark - Julia Heaberlin Page 0,2

was ten that fairy tale shit don’t work.

Those pieces of falling blue sky? They aren’t made of pretty flowers. They’re made of glass.

But I have a healthy respect for whatever my arm says. It’s saying, Walk away. Don’t go to prison even though that’s where you probably belong.

This girl, she reminds me of Trumanell. 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 stop wavering. This one’s on you, God. I step full into her circle and pick her up. She goes limp in my arms like a child, head bowed, chin dropped to her chest. She is a child. Don’t forget that. My sister is yakking at me even though she’s tucked at home fifteen miles away finishing up the dishes or reading one of her books.

Halfway to the truck, the girl slowly tilts her face up. She opens her red mouth and I see that her tongue is streaked just as red. That’s why I’m not expecting what’s coming. Don’t see what’s in her hand. She puts a dandelion to her lips, and blows its head off right at me, full force. The wish hits my cheek like a sneeze, flies up my nose, sticks in my eyelashes.

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.

When I open the truck to lay her in, one of Trumanell’s sayings flies out, a thought from some old Irish lady.

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

The paper flutters in the rearview as I pull away and catches in the barbed wire.

3

Trumanell is a shadow on the porch, waiting. The girl’s still as a corpse in my arms, the gold scarf glittering around her neck. The sun, at full blare, lights her like she’s on fire. You can’t tell anything’s much wrong with her eyes closed.

Our grandmother’s shadow on the porch was the high sign that danger had passed, and it was safe to run in from the field. Then Mama Pat died, and it was all left up to Trumanell. She was ten.

I can hear Trumanell’s mind tinkering like the inside of a clock while she holds open the screen door for me to pass. Where’d she come from? Why didn’t he call the cops? Trumanell’s peach skin is crinkled with worry, exactly like the first time I remember her face peering at me through the bars of the crib Daddy built. Her face was four days away from being five years old, which made me hardly two, both of us innocents.

Trumanell climbed up that crib and stuck her sweaty, hot hands over my ears just in time. I heard a scream from far away, like it was stuffed in a closet. That’s the day Trumanell says our father killed our mother. She was cremated, no autopsy. From then on, if Trumanell could take a bad thing away with her bare hands, she would.

Her hands snatched me up the ladder to the barn loft, my red sneakers disappearing from the last rung, a second from being seen. They slammed three rounds into an ostrich that got loose on the next farm over, tore our puppy to bits, and then went after me. They stitched secret pockets into the hems of our bedroom curtains so they could hide whatever weapon was available.

A steak knife, a gun, a knitting needle, a can of Lysol. All I knew was, Trumanell never let my curtain go empty. If I reached a hand in, something was there. Daddy hit us sometimes. But mostly, he just played with our minds.

Trumanell’s mind was her third hand. She could outwit Daddy nine times out of ten. My clever girl. That’s what he called her after a bottle of Jack. He named her Trumanell, half-girl, half-boy, to remind her every day that he’d have preferred she was another male to carry his line. In secret, I called her True, because that’s what she was.

As I brush by, Trumanell presses one of her magic hands to Angel’s forehead. She’s checking to see if Angel’s dead. I feel a sigh run through me, Angel’s or my own. That’s because Trumanell’s hand on your forehead is like the Virgin Mary’s. Cool as a river, smoothing out the pain in