LUCKY

Frank knows what it is to be lucky.

Frank knows that he is lucky to be alive, lucky to still be breathing. Lucky to still be seeing through two eyes instead of one, lucky to be able to put his hand to his face and feel the flutter of eyelashes, the soft folded flesh of his eyelid, the sticky wet of his eye, recoiling from his fingertips.

Frank doesn't know why he's lucky, or how, or what exactly this luck is. But he knows that he's lucky.

Frank knows that some people aren't as lucky as him. The Darkos, for example, Mr. and Mrs. and Samantha and Elizabeth, his girlfriend who he can't even look at anymore, can't even kiss. Not without feeling crazy, not without seeing faces in his head, dream-people who look like her but aren't her.

They aren’t lucky.

Frank is lucky, but Frank doesn't know why he's lucky, or why he keeps seeing Donnie in his dreams. Donnie Darko, his girlfriend's brother, dead at sixteen from being crushed by a jet engine that just fell out of the fucking sky one night. A freak accident that wiped an entire person out of the world, made Elizabeth's eyes red and puffy and her hands shake and her voice go quiet when she told him about it.

Like he needed to be told.

Frank remembers watching it fall from the window of his car, parked outside the Darkos' house. That night, the sky was so deep and black that he'd only been able to stare at it, look up and think about how much he loved Elizabeth, just how fucking much. He would do anything for her. He would die for her.

And then it fell.

It came from nowhere, or practically nowhere. A circular pack of clouds, white against all the blackness. But there was no plane. Nowhere for it to fall from, except for those clouds. No explanation for it.

Frank saw it fall, and even though he knew he should go inside and make sure Elizabeth was okay, he didn't. Because somehow he knew that she was. She was okay and Donnie was dead and all of a sudden he had a movie running through his head. A movie where Donnie didn't die.

A movie where there was nothing for Frank but a Halloween costume he hadn't made yet and a dead girl, lying in the arms of a boy he had never seen before. A boy who pointed a gun at Frank and shot him in the head, and then Frank was dead and Donnie wasn't and then

Poof.

Frank wasn't dead anymore. Frank wasn't dead and his costume was just sketches on his drawing table, and the entire world seemed to have gone off its orbit because everything is infintesimally different. Everything. Now Frank has a movie in his head and Elizabeth is always crying and he can't drive his car anymore. He sells it as fast as he can, and tears up all the drawings he has in his room. He sells the bronze sculpture of a rabbit mask that will never be made to a girl he recognizes from his dreams, a girl he last saw lying dead in Donnie Darko's arms.

That Halloween, he stays in his room and draws. Elizabeth doesn't call him. There is no party.

Frank sketches Donnie's face, black ink on white paper. He looks like Elizabeth turned suddenly, inexplicably male, the same heart-shaped face, the same nose and cheeks, the same dark hair. The only difference is, his eyes are deep and intelligent and wounded, not the numb and frightened red of Elizabeth's eyes at all.

Donnie, pointing a gun.

Donnie, walking with a sleepy smile on his face, like a child's.

Donnie, writing a message to himself with thick black ink, sure and steady strokes against the pale flesh of his inner arm. A countdown to a day that will never come for him, or a day that has already come for him. Come and gone.

Frank reads and re-reads a story that his English teacher assigned him in high school, the one where a group of kids break into a house and burn everything they find there. He wonders what it must be like, to have to destroy in order to be able to create.

Frank thinks about broken pipes, fire, guns. The wheels of a car, strong enough to crush a girl beneath them. Strong enough to wreck an entire universe.

Frank is lucky, and he doesn't know why. He just knows that he's lucky, if being saved by the person who killed you can be called 'luck'. Maybe they just call that ‘karma’.

 

END

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