Everything Will Be Fine by Crystal Little
In “Everything Will Be Fine” by Crystal Little, the narrator is propelled by family difficulties from one bad choice to another, her conviction that things will be “fine” helping her rationalize her recklessness. What makes her so likeable despite her criminal behavior is her naivete and good intentions. Like the ethical dilemma created by psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg that poses the question of a man who breaks into a lab to steal a drug for his dying wife, Little resorts to bank robbery to solve her family’s crises. As in Kohlberg’s model of moral development, how we as readers respond to Little’s dilemma reveals something about ourselves. Do we justify her actions and rationalizations or reject them, and on what basis?
In her essay, Little walks the reader through her choices in language that is exceptionally vivid and gripping. Ultimately, it doesn’t take much to decide to rob a bank. “The space between intent and action is the width of an open car door,” Little says. As she moves us through her narrative, it is also the use of space between one sentence and the next that propels the reader between moments, thoughts, and actions.
A closer look at the essay reveals a structure that is partitioned, one that makes use of an abundance of white space. In the first section of the essay, titled denial, Little writes: “The numbers don’t lie, but I do. / I’ll figure it out, I tell myself. / I’ll find a way; I’ll get caught up.” One longer sentence intrudes, then the author adds: “Everything will be fine.” It’s almost poetic. Staccato. One thought leads to another, and the reader is dragged in the wake of the narrator’s denial.
In her craft essay, “White Space: An Annotation,” Jennifer Gravley says that “every space is a possibility. The space between one word and the next is where the writer weaves memory onto the page.” In “Everything Will Be Fine,” the white space helps carries the narrative forward, reflects the author’s “frantic, disorganized mindset,” and builds a sense of empathy in the reader. However we judge the narrator’s choices, we’re totally engaged in this propulsive story. —CRAFT
i. denial
I can’t admit I’ve fucked up. Not to myself, and certainly not to anyone else.
It simply doesn’t track. I’m the responsible one in the family. The reliable one. The sober one. Rock steady, perpetually calm amid chaos and crisis since childhood. I’ve managed and mitigated drunken fistfights among my dad and my two older brothers; I’ve ridden out my mom’s chain-smoking manic episodes and her subsequent hospitalizations; I’ve made funeral arrangements at age fifteen after my dad’s death; and I’ve navigated both my brothers’ multiple DUIs and their rotating stints in county lockup.
Now, in my mid-twenties, after I’ve cleaned up my brothers’ financial messes without fail—rinse, wash, repeat—I can’t wrap my head around being so underwater I’m sucking down silt.
The numbers don’t lie, but I do.
I’ll figure it out, I tell myself.
I’ll find a way; I’ll get caught up.
I’ll pay down my mom’s nursing home balance; I’ll reconcile our checking accounts; I’ll make it work, just like always.
Everything will be fine.
Both my brothers are hounding me for money.
For groceries and gas, Billy says.
For diapers and wipes, John tells me.
I want to believe both of them—even now, after what feels like a much longer lifetime of knowing better—but I can’t shake the certainty that I’m only fueling certain habits.
Still, I can’t turn down either of them; Mom would be furious.
Meanwhile, I’m past due on rent and utilities, and side-eyeing the latest car insurance premium. My mom’s nursing home bills for the last two months are outstanding, and I’m dodging calls from the office administrator.
I’ll figure it out, though.
Everything will be fine.
Two truths: Nothing is fine, and I refuse to acknowledge fact in favor of self-preservationist fiction.
And a lie: I’ll make it fine.
I don’t have an epiphany. No lightbulb flash or eureka! moment. The prospect is pure magical thinking, concocted in a crisis-mode vacuum where I’ve abandoned reality and created a bizarre version of my own.
I just need a surgical mask and the right pair of sunglasses.
The space between intent and action is the width of an open car door.
When the door is closed, so is the finite likelihood of an idiotic life-altering decision. Inside the gold Toyota sedan on this sleepy Saturday morning, no broken laws exist.
But once the door cracks and swings, potential energy bleeds to kinetic. In half a heartbeat, compartmentalization morphs into dissociation.
I only have to be this stranger to myself for less than five minutes. By becoming this person for just a few moments, I’ll make everything all right again.
Inside the tense silence of the bank, heart beating on the back of my tongue, I project as much calm as I can muster, and I assure the startled teller I’m not there to harm him or anyone else. I remember to say Please and Thank you, because I’m not rude, just desperate.
I’m also blind-lucky on multiple counts: No customers, no security guard, no complications. I rush out to the still-running Camry and drive away, veering into a nearby neighborhood to pause and uncover my license plate.
My hands are unsteady, and I feel like projectile vomiting, but I’m back to my actual self, where I can pay the bills and ensure that Mom receives the care she needs.
In terms of financial gain, my first bank robbery is a success.
By all other measures, it’s a failure.
ii. anger
An icy band crackles around my ribs when UNKNOWN NUMBER lights up my phone after 9 p.m. on a Sunday.
Against what’s surely my better judgment, I answer, and hear the familiar recorded message, which manages to sound both automated and upbeat before and after my brother’s bellowed name: This is a collect call from John, an inmate at the Fayette County Detention Center.
“Get me a lawyer,” he says as soon as I agree to accept.
I inhale through my nose, exhale from my mouth, listening to his demand bounce off cinderblock and steel.
“How am I supposed to afford that?”
My voice is arctic: quiet, clipped, measured. I don’t even know what he’s been charged with this time, let alone the how or the why.
“Just…I need some help here, okay? You’ve got to get me somebody.”
“I don’t know how I can.”
“Well, figure it out.”
He’s still high, or maybe on the comedown—tough to tell by speech alone with such a shitty connection. I clench my jaw and squeeze my cell hard, harder, until the plastic creaks next to my ear.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“You get me a lawyer.”
I end the call and ignore his second one.
Mom phones early, while I’m on my way to work, inching toward Alumni Drive with the rest of Lexington’s campus-bound traffic on Tates Creek Road. I come to a stop at a red light before answering.
“Did you know John was arrested?”
So much for pleasantries.
I hesitate, weighing the pros and cons of feigning surprise.
“Yeah.” My answer is more like a sigh of acknowledgment. “He called last night.”
“He called me too.”
My frown deepens.
“He shouldn’t have bothered you like that.”
“He didn’t have much of a choice. He said you hung up on him.”
The light turns green. I check the intersection before rolling forward.
“Well, I did.”
Ahead of me, the bottleneck just past Alumni is beginning to thin out. Silence spools on the line.
When Mom speaks again, her voice wavers.
“Crystal, how could you let this happen?”
The question lands square in my stomach.
My knuckles are bloodless on the steering wheel. My rage is unholy, so bright and razored, I’m half-surprised I’m still in my body.
“Okay, Mom.”
I lick my lips, choosing my next words with deliberate care.
“If you think I let this happen, that I’m somehow responsible for a grown man’s actions and choices, and it’s somehow my fault that he got arrested when I don’t even know what he’s been up to—” I have to pause to swallow; I’m trying to stay even, but my voice is beginning to shake. “If that’s what you really think, then maybe…maybe we shouldn’t talk to each other for a little while.”
Mom begins to cry.
“No,” she says, thick and miserable, “that’s not what I want.”
I feel like an asshole, but I don’t hold my tongue.
“Except you think it’s my fault?”
“I’m just upset. You know we have to help him, we’ve got to get him out of there.”
I age twenty years between one breath and the next.
“All right. I’ll see what I can do.”
iii. bargaining
One more time.
One more bank.
One more five minute side trip to an upside-down parallel universe of my own creation.
I can split myself into a stranger capable of another monstrous criminal act one more time.
I can.
And no one will ever have to know.
iv. depression
Mom’s death is an out-of-focus kaleidoscope, the hours at her hospital bedside blurred by compassionate care decisions under fluorescent lights and the hiss of high-flow oxygen, the minutes made sharper by the strangled sound of my brother Billy’s sobs on the phone from four hours away.
The next number I dial is my teenage niece, Brooke—Billy’s daughter, though Mom and I practically raised Brooke. We’re less niece and aunt, more daughter and mother, despite being only twelve years apart. The conversation with Brooke is the hardest, but I want her to hear this news from me, because even if I’m crying, I can say I love you and This is awful and I know you hate this and I’m sorry when her father can’t.
Calls and texts collide with in-person visits from lifelong friends and extended family, and if I was minimally processing in the before, I’m nothing but numb in the after, standing just inside the doorway of the all-too-still room, the only sound the scratch of the dying pen in my hand as I sign the necessary release for the hospital to the funeral home.
I don’t recognize my complicated grief for what it is. I don’t know how to approach it, let alone touch it or begin to comprehend it.
I’m an adult orphan as I leave the small community hospital just over the Tennessee line. I crisscross Kentucky, driving back to Lexington for suitable funeral attire for myself and for Mom’s body, then travel to western Kentucky to pick up Billy and Brooke. We head back down to our hometown near the Tennessee border for the arrangements.
Meanwhile, the Fayette County Detention Center declines to transport John for the memorial. It’s too close to the state line, I’m told. He’s a flight risk. Even if I somehow paid the transport fee with money I didn’t currently have, the correctional powers that be would refuse to allow John to pay his respects in person.
The day of the service, I greet mourners at the funeral parlor with a sense of surreal detachment, fielding questions about John’s absence.
“He wasn’t able to make it,” I say, the words like a mouthful of ashes.
It’s a small town; most everyone knows he’s in jail six counties and three hours away.
On the back porch of the funeral home, heartbroken Billy gets drunk and drunker, and his buddies from high school keep him occupied out there as a kindness to me and Brooke.
After the service, Brooke rides back to Lexington with a friend amidst what looks like an entire florist’s shop of flowers and plants so Brooke can stay with me for a few days. I return Billy back to Dixon before making my way home. He’s able to sleep in snatches in the passenger seat next to me, the sweet-sour smell of cheap beer and better bourbon accompanying his snores.
During the last leg of my jaunt, near midnight on Interstate 64 in the desolate expanse of southern Indiana and hurtling east toward Louisville, I’m so hollowed out that I don’t feel connected to my extremities, even though I can see my hands on the steering wheel. I’ve logged almost 2,000 miles in less than three days.
Surrender could be easy, I think, bleary-eyed and blinking hard to concentrate on the deserted highway, if I just let go of the wheel and keep my foot on the gas.
I can’t, though.
Moreover, I won’t.
I will not become one more tragedy that Brooke has to survive.
I phone a night-owl friend, instead, who keeps me awake as we talk about everything but the past seventy-two hours for the remainder of the drive. She doesn’t know, but our conversation is more than a metaphorical life-saver.
I’m consumed by competing bouts of numbness and anxiety. I’m an unreliable narrator; in earnest, I think I’m navigating the bereavement fog with my usual push on, push through approach, still seemingly functional on the outside, at least while I’m at work. All the while, I’m overwhelmed; I’m not sleeping well, or even resting; I’m lying about how I’m doing; I’m exhausted no matter how much time I spend in bed; I’m ruminating on unpaid funeral expenses; I’m dreading the necessity of yet another bank robbery.
Week by week, month by month, I fold inward fraction by fraction, again and again, an artless origami implosion.
v. acceptance
The morning of my fourth robbery, I’m caught within an hour. I don’t yet know it, but there’s a GPS tracker among the bills I was handed.
Worse, Brooke is asleep upstairs. She’s been staying with me in Lexington, getting some much-needed space from her dad, and working over the summer in her first office internship.
As a swarm of local law enforcement hammers the front door of the townhouse, I step into Brooke’s room. Her eyes squint open.
“What? Who’s knocking?”
“The police,” I say. “But don’t worry, it’s going to be okay.”
As the pounding continues, I head back downstairs.
The officers look confused when I answer, sporting a short-sleeved blue shirt and jeans, barefoot.
Multiple guns are pointed at me.
“Whoa, you guys.” I’m equal parts calm, polite, and stunned as I raise my empty hands. “Could we put those down, please?”
In a surprising show of good faith—and maybe due to bafflement—they do just that.
I sit down on the front steps as instructed, and Brooke joins me a moment later, bewildered and sniffling.
“You’re just like Dad,” she says, more hurt than disgusted.
“I’m not.” My voice sounds far away, echoing somewhere outside myself. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
I waive my rights and give a full confession at the station.
I see no point in lying; it would be a waste of everyone’s time and effort, my own included.
To prove I’m not under the influence of any substances, I gesture to my unmarked arms, and even offer to take a blood test, but I’m told it’s not necessary.
I’m resigned and soft-spoken as I sit and confirm the details of each bank location and incident until my arresting detective asks if Brooke was an accomplice.
“Of course not!” Panic claws up my throat, making my tongue thick and slow and stupid with terror and indignation. “She’s just a kid, she doesn’t know anything. Jesus Christ, I would never involve her—this was all me, only ever just me, you’ve got to believe me.”
As my body shakes, I realize I’ve come out of my chair; I’m standing upright, every breath short and shallow.
The detective’s eyes latch onto mine.
“Crystal, hey, okay.” She nods. “I believe you.”
I exhale an unsteady sigh and sink into my seat.
“All right.” I scrub the tears from my sawdust-raw eyes. “Thank you.”
Before I’m transported to the Fayette County jail for booking, she asks if I’ve eaten anything.
Her kindness surprises me.
I shake my head.
“I wasn’t really hungry this morning.”
She lifts her chin in acknowledgment.
“They’ll feed you something when you get there.”
I return the nod on autopilot, unable to envision the months of room-temperature baloney and sad slices of sandwich bread in my future.
CRYSTAL LITTLE is a Kentucky writer and an advocate for criminal justice reform. She is a 2025-26 Lyman T. Johnson Fellow pursuing her MFA at the University of Kentucky. Her work explores the American criminal justice system, class, and redemption. She is an editorial assistant for New Limestone Review, and she is currently working on a memoir. Find her on Instagram @justalittleapocalypse.
Featured image by Larry Farr, courtesy of Unsplash.
