We Are All the Same in the Dark - Julia Heaberlin Page 0,93

pretend little truce.

Now my toes are playing in the cool grass, but my heels are still on fire. Not a thing out here is moving but the lights of two distant planes that look like they’re on a path to collide.

I dig through the Walmart bag for my flip-flops, abandon the crappy running shoes on Dexter’s slab, turn on my flashlight. This place is an obstacle course of gravestones, piles of dirt, waiting rectangular holes, trees trying to push up rotting dead people with their roots.

When my heel squishes into the muddy grass over the bones of a Sweet Baby Grace, age 4, it doesn’t bother me in the least. Cemeteries are where I think best. From ages ten to twelve, I liked to lie down on top of my mother’s grave and go to sleep. That’s where my aunt, drunk and pissed off, would sometimes find me at four in the morning.

My mother and I used to take walks in a different kind of cemetery, a field a couple of miles from our trailer. Cactus popped out of the ground as far as we could see. She’d say we were walking through the devil’s gravestones—that the yellow dandelions poking up around prickly evil were reminders of resurrection.

Wish big. That was what she told me, while we sat on rocks and blew dandelions. Her big wish was a black granite countertop.

I’m almost certain I passed this same shepherd with the broken nose a few minutes ago. I’ve been lost in enough cemeteries to know that it always feels like the graves are moving around, playing a sneaky game of chess.

On Sunday, the Bat Queen seemed to tower over everything. Now I’m coming up behind the shoulder of every angel and Virgin Mary like I’m looking for a lost friend in a dark club.

I’m about to give up when I almost trip over her.

A black-and-yellow blanket is draped like a Christmas tree skirt around her ankles. Presents are spread out underneath: stuffed animals, a baby doll with a hollow O for a mouth, a Batgirl figurine and a Princess Barbie still in their boxes, fake red carnations spray-glued with glitter, a crucifix stuck in the ground.

I run the flashlight up the stone folds of the dress to her face. Someone has shimmied up her and strung a silver broken-heart necklace around her neck.

All of these gifts are new, since the unveiling. After the memorial, cops were everywhere cleaning up stuffed animals and mementoes and sticking them in black garbage bags. A city worker had climbed a ladder to remove the pink lei and Mardi Gras beads that had been ring-tossed around her neck from the back of the crowd.

I pick up a sign knocked over on the ground and jam it back in place.

Leave Your Love Only. Thank You, The Mayor

This seems like permission to unwrap the blanket from around the Bat Queen’s ugly feet and use it for myself. I lay it out in front of her like a picnic blanket. A black bat is crocheted into a yellow oval in the center. The universal signal for distress. I sit in the middle of it and finish off the cold hamburger and onion rings. I lick the sugar off a sour gummy snake.

I reach over for the largest teddy bear, a white one holding a red heart in his paws, and stuff him under my head as a pillow. I close my eyes.

I see Odette the Warrior on her last night. The sharp outline of her shadow. The headlights of her truck smoking into the field.

I don’t think Odette was whacked on the back of the head or took a knife from behind. I think Odette fought. I think she saw her killer’s face before she died, and it was someone she knew.

I think she lost because she was a good person, not because she had only one leg.

Odette hesitated before deciding her killer should die, just like my mother did.

When my father raised his shotgun, my mother was focused on me. She hesitated, too, and that was her mistake.

I won’t hesitate.

It wouldn’t matter if Odette gave me a list with a hundred nice words.

I’m just not as good a person.

When my eyelids flip open, I’m flat on hard ground, staring straight up at the sky. One of the statue’s wings is stabbing a black triangle out of the moon. I’m not sure what woke me, but there’s a sense something did. I sit up. The moon is a full