SALT and BONE
1.
Sam's figure cuts smoothly through the rushes like the fin of a fish, his cotton plaid arms licked by watery blue-green plant tongues. The wind is blowing and it draws back brown hair from his eyes. It bares plain the sting of cold laid over the bones of his face, reddish and rough. Dean keeps an eye on him from the upstairs window.
When Sam waves, Dean waves back.
2.
There is a fringe of cobweb in ragged shreds on Dean's temple. It is like old skin coming loose from long slow burns in the sun. They are in every corner of the house and Dean's short hair catches them as he walks through.
The house is old. It is a collection of rooms filled with stagnant air sharpened with mildew acridity. It is a standing box of shook up mementoes, ugly fancies, solid furniture, and heavy appliances dating back from the Cult of Domesticity. There are mason jars, albums in paper sleeves, and aspic molds. They make the space a mosaic of times and tastes thrown together like a garage sale hosted by someone who has seen the decades go by from a single kitchen window. None of it is his, but Dean takes it as is.
There is gristle in the dust when he puts his palm down on the roll-down shutters of an old desk. The living room is chopped up into pieces of dark and light. No artificial light is normal for a house this broken down and this lonely out in the fields, so Dean hasn't seen any electrical flickering so far.
There only light comes from the brash slats of white autumn sun sprawling in from wherever gaps have been left in the grayed curtains. In these windows, weathered paint flakes away from the untreated wood sills. Some of the sashes are thrown up just a sliver. Dried leaves crept inside from these cracks, and they crumble as they get into the lines of Dean's boot soles.
Dean goes to the windows to look for Sam outside. Sam is a cutout wading through the waves of sweet grass. Dean catches hints of the scent sometimes, cutting through the musk of the house. Sam didn't have much to say about the house, but he does like the long-stem grasses growing around it in all directions. He likes the fruit all dried up inside the husks and how they give off a fresh bread smell.
Sam also likes the little pond that isn't too far off, one of those seasonal prairie waterholes that will have fish and tadpoles gasping to death in a spare inch of water come next summer. He's headed there now, and Dean watches him, nodding.
3.
Sam's hair is long, so that a ring of bright afternoon light sits on his crown as he goes after the calls of red-winged blackbirds. He can't find where they are after they snap shut the flashy patches of their armpits. They disappear into the silent cottonwood branches. He shrugs and goes on anyways.
He doesn't go too close to the water's edge but just in case, he rolls up the scuffed denim of his pants legs around his ankles. He likes the yellow flags and their tassled petal edges shuddering in the wind. He likes the sawed teeth look to the stiff dead weeds that the past year's weather couldn't beat into the ground. Sam thinks that Dean was right to choose here.
He can see Dean looking for him from the window of the house where he's cleaning it up. His brother's face is framed by taupe planks-old wood eaten down by strong- lunged northerlies. Sam raises his arm to let him know he'll be coming to help soon.
4.
Sam's broad shoulders flash gold and worn plaid when he holds up his hand. But Dean can see oily gray cloud clots far off in the distance. Rain's coming. On the Great Plains, storms hurl across open spaces quicker than wildfire. The coming lightening and thunder clamps down on the tongue with a full-bodied weight.
The Impala is bunking in the old barn like a tied up horse, parked between bales of moldy hay and dinged milk cans. Sam had helped Dean walk the entire straw-strewn floor, keeping his head tilted up to squint for a stretch of roof where he couldn't see the sky coming through.
It's a car. A little rain won't hurt it. But Dean had wanted his car to stay dry if was being kept indoors. Plus, he hadn't wanted bits of old livestock feed sticking to her.
The barn is a dozen times bigger than the house, so Dean had needed to start her up and drive her to the patch of good roof Sam found by the western wall. Sam had raised an eyebrow at how she'd looked like John Dillinger's getaway car, guiltily stashed in Farmer Brown's barn. But Dean had only patted the black hood over her faithful engine, giving formal thanks. He knew that he wouldn't be able to take her out for a while.
5.
Sam sees the sudden rippling on the water's surface like the hackles rising on an animal's back. He stills and observes, interested in the little muddy eddies curling out from the lips of water. He doesn't see the black shapes coming, loping low in grasses like feral dogs. Instead, he turns to go back to where Dean is purifying the house. He knows that soon the chaos and light and noise and rainfall will break free and catch in his very teeth
6.
Dean transverses the room again. Level with his hips on the tables are white-bordered photos with men jacketed in tweed and women dressed in twill. Dean, however, is wrapped in his father's leather, setting him against the house's chill. He takes inventory.
There are shells of wrought cold iron, some stuffed with blessed salt. They mostly camouflage among the stains that are loose and scattered like dirt spills on the floor. But a few are embedded in the cheap spackle of the walls. Powerful pellets of holiness are crammed inside tiny holes that have sprouted spider-leg fine cracks.
Hanging in the window are rowan wood tablets brushed over with holy water collected from the cistern of the Hagia Sophia itself. Strung up on red threads, they clack restlessly like wind chimes.
There is black voodoo dust, the scraped char of an iron pot minced finely and folded into a bowlful of salt left under the full moon for three days time. It's laid out across the threshold like a sand snake stretched out on its belly.
It's all quality, the best to be had. It makes Dean's mouth twist to have to look at it.
7.
When Sam goes back, he rubs his hands to his wind-chapped face to try to bring some warmth back into it. His calluses are thick like plastic and there are hooked catches in his skin. They are the raggedy edges of broken blisters and splinters from the railing of the sagging porch from where he'd come out earlier.
His eyes go behind his fingers. In the dark he can hear the crackle of the sky ready to break apart. He can also hear the sudden push from the wind making the waters draw up close in a violent flush, shore slapping against the plants at the water's edge. There is frostiness inside his mouth warning of a coming ground freeze. On Sam's tongue it's an ache, strange and sweet.
He doesn't see the hunters at his back. He never does.
8.
Dean is still in the house, intently taking inventory. This time it's concepts.
Kerosene. Gasoline. Lighter Fluid. Diesel. Ethanol. Cooking Oil.
When they spilled he'd expected them to gas, choke, and smother the seeds underneath. But the heartland hearth is strong and the grasses send up green shoots, even where the salt leeches free from their bags. Dean can see it all from the window, as clearly as Sam circling the house.
Types.
Possessions. Remains.
Corporeal. Incorporeal.
Cognizant. Not.
Dean. And Sam.
9.
Dean can hear Sam's scream fighting its way through thickness, muffled by all the water in the air. He calmly goes to his dresser drawers and pulls out his guns one by one.
That was the first thing he'd done when they got here. The dresser is lined with patterned paper so old that their cracks gave in to his careful fingertips, scraps lifting away. And like a father putting daughters to bed, he had put down his guns clean and calm amid pink checked bedding. Now he wakes them up, lays them out in line-up set on top of vintage photos and garbage.
Dean picks out one pulled from the bottom drawer. He looks it over. Rust trims the barrel with lacy orange filigree. But he raises it, knowing it's ready to shoot. He holds it steady in his arms.
10.
Fresh blood pools dust into muddy pudding.
11.
But before that, there were bones in a pond bank made into a mallard's nest. That year they were stepped upon by webbed yellow feet of all different sizes. They are still there. They are not bleached white and stark but are dark like old sticks. Because they are so long, from someone so tall, they look like the broken boughs of a young black ash tree. They were pressed upon by dense wet seasons muck and dusted with loose dry season soil until they became of the earth. They are dyed rich and are made shy in the clutch of humble Midwest sod.
There are also guns. They are upstairs the farmer's decrepit house in a water-damaged dresser. Its pink gingham insides warp and go more yellow every year. The beaten down, stained dresser is in a room past several doorways traced over with solid lines of gritty black salt, strong as lines of caulk. But the guns are beautiful. There is a M1911 semi-automatic in the top drawer; a sawed-off Browning A-5 shotgun in the middle; and a Heckler and Koch G3 sniper rifle in the bottom drawer.
They have been forgotten. There are patterns of rust carving into their sides from the damp. None of them are loaded. Soon they will look the part of pawnshop litter like everything else in the house.
12.
There are many more bones now, many more, but that does not matter.
It does matter that once, there were none.
Once, Dean had let Sam ride in the backseat with his feet up, his shaggy head tucked down to his chest. Dean had silently driven down a long road with no streetlights. The ink soup blackness was broken up only by the faint hiss of grass heads rubbing against each other in the dark. Listening to Sam breathe, heavy and deep, all Dean had wanted was to get him to a better life.
When they had arrived, Sam had rested bloodshot eyes on the ramshackle building. At the same time a gentle orange and pale blue wash had come in from a sunrise in the east. After they'd found a place for the Impala, Dean had taken him inside. There had been house sparrows speaking in their sputtering voices on top of the kitchen cabinets, and old taps spitting up pebbles to rattle in the sink even as the water ran cold and clear around them.
He'd made Sam sleep wrapped up in their jackets until noon. Dean had done his best to rest beside him. But by the time Sam had started to stir, all he'd managed to do was promise Sam that they won't run any more, quietly so he wouldn't wake him. After a late breakfast of the few wormless apples from the tree in the yard and slices of bagged white bread, Sam had looked up and smiled at his brother.
He'd said that he was okay, put on his oldest and biggest shirt, and gone outside.
The hunters don't ever stop coming, even now. And he and Sam won't—can't—ever cross paths. But Dean keeps his word.
They'll never run again.
Dean is bound by salt. Sam is bound by bone.
13.
Sam waves. Dean always waves back
AUTHOR'S NOTES
I was looking at the Supernatural fics I already wrote and thought "Grittier. Need to get grittier." I don't think it turned out gritty, though. The lonely plains imagery makes me hopeful for desolate, though. I'd settle for desolate. Is it desolate?
Anyways, a variant on the Winchesters setting up house theme. I fucked myself on schoolwork, but that's more of the same.