My days are consumed like smoke
My days are consumed like smoke
-Book of Psalms-
She thinks she's your first kiss, maybe that's why she offers it so freely, to reclaim part of the innocence she's lost long ago.
She's not your first kiss and you already know at your fourteen that she won't be your last, but she is your first cigarette as she inhales from the stub she's holding and then her mouth hovers close to yours and the smoke comes out and her mouth is on yours and she exhales and you take smoke in and sweet youth (older than you but youth) and you expect nothing more but she becomes your first lay.
Locked in the bathroom, Sam deep asleep on the bed hugging the covers and drool down his mouth and Dad trying to find a contact telling you to look out for her, keep her safe, it would come back for her like it did for Annie and Rosalinda and Tiffany and her other friends/colleagues and you see the way your father looks at her and his face hardens but his eyes grow soft when he wraps her wounded elbow in new gauze and you think you hear him mutter something about men being the monsters, the world being the monsters when she answers Sam that she's seventeen years old.
The thing's been going after them for a few weeks now, they're always found mangled in the dark corners they work in a pool of their own blood and the press has called it The American Ripper but they wouldn't listen to dad when he told them to get off the streets or carry salt. This one was smart, she listened, got away just in time, found them, tried to help them. Now Dad is trying to find the bones and there is no clue or hint to show him where to find them because it's a ghost alright, and it's not a Jack but a Jane, murdered years ago and now killing her own kind.
All the wards and salt lines are put and Sammy is asleep and you're keeping watch with her waiting for dad to come back with a location and then she lights a cigarette she hadn't dared with John around and when you told her to put it out because Sammy was asleep and he might start coughing she took one last drag and exhaled it in your mouth and took you in the bathroom and didn't yell with your awkward moves pushing her against the cold tiles but kept on saying "that's right, honey, that's good, honey" and you kept pounding inside her and had to muffle your own scream when you came and fell on the floor. She doesn't feel seventeen years old, she feels forty, the way you do sometimes when dad leaves and you have to take care of Sam, but it's a different kind of adulthood and you can't understand it, only how young you felt inside of her, and how old she was, how she protected you, promised you were doing okay. She felt like a mother and your mind doesn't even want to go there, not when you had your first lay and you wonder if Sam is still asleep.
You both clean up and she kisses you again, no smoke this time, and she smiles and looks forty again and says "Don't tell your dad" and it's not like you would, not the way she is stroking your hair right now, over and over again telling you how beautiful you are. It isn't love, you're old enough to know that, but you love her just a little bit for the way she is touching your hair and the way her freckles stand out once she removes the heavy dirty make-up. And you're thinking that maybe, once this is over, all over you could talk to dad and you could take her with you, you got a seat empty and you can erase this night from your head because you always wanted a sister, and if dad doesn't agree you could always call Pastor Jim or Bobby and take her off the streets, give her a home to return to because the one she has sucks.
She told you, before the bathroom and after John left, how your father loved you and Sam so much and she'd give anything to have people take care of her the way you three are taking care of each other, and she hadn't cried at all, but you felt as if she had, and you tell her that, just that, how she should ride with you when this is over and it would be, because John Winchester takes care of things, how she could have people taking care of her too, and she had smiled and gone for her cigarette and things had played out the way they did.
This is the third night in a row you go through this (the first with the bathroom though) and you hope so much that dad will come back with good news.
You sit on the chair, and feel different, so different, your adulthood now closer to hers, and Sammy wriggles in his sleep and the cover half falls down. Before you have a chance to, she's already up, tucking the cover back over your brother, and you love her just a little bit more for that and tell her that see? She's already getting the hang of taking care of people, and she smiles, but it's one of those smiles John Winchester has when he's talking about mom, everything good threaded with a coarse ribbon of sorrow.
You walk to the window, push the blinds with two fingers and look outside. The world seems to have faded, lost to the spring fog, lights throwing patters over the parked cars and the road in the distance and your mind is pulled to dad being out there, in the fog alone. Fog like a wayward cloud moves and caresses and curls around everything and you think of the way the smoke came out of her nostrils and then her mouth and then in yours, how smoke curled and bound you together in dainty chains and bathroom rituals.
You recognize the hum of the Impala before you see it materialize out of the fog like a ghost and then dad comes and even though you feel different he has zero clues.
Fog falls almost every night, that's what you'll always remember from that week there. Fog and her freckles and Jane fucking Ripper and goddammit why do ghosts have to be so streetsmart sometimes, why can't they simply have bones you can burn? Dad locates the grave two nights later and you're all there when he burns them and she asks is it really over and your dad says yes, and she leans on him and cries and looks younger, much, much younger than you or Sammy now, but it's a different kind of childhood, one that was never spent.
And dad makes the offer, like you hoped and knew he would, saying that he has a friend, Pastor Jim, who knows people that take care of others who need it, and she needs it, don't you, sweetheart, and she does, oh she does. John says you'll all drive her there and she says she'll just go and pack her stuff and you all go to the motel to do the same thing really, and dad has the TV on when it says how another prostitute had barely escaped attack and was now in a coma in hospital and that happened right now and dad compares time and you realize that it doesn't add up.
"Those were her bones without a doubt," John says, and you know it's true cuz he says so, as he swerves the car to go find her, uncertain about whether she's safe anymore. You try to figure out how this can be, the bones burnt, that was salt, and your dad mumbles and calls Bobby up from a payphone and you catch phrases and realize that maybe, just maybe in rare cases, the ghost is tied to a place not the bones.
As dad drives you dig up through his notes, read aloud through everything till you find the part that names the particular street Jane hang out at and you realize that you got to consecrate the whole street to be safe, and only dad can do it, but she will be alone.
Dad has Sam by his side and he hands you the car keys with the order to drive safely and calmly to her place, pick her up then go barricade yourself among heaps of salt lines, do you understand, son?
You do. You always do. You see the dilemma in his eyes as he picks up everything he needs from the car and then he lets Sam go with you.
"Heaps of salt lines, and fast," he repeats, though you don't think there will be a problem because the ghost only kills women, and prostitutes at that.
Fog has fallen this night too and you start to hate this white mass of nothing a bit but it gives you cover in the night, no patrol to catch you, and think of dad consecrating the ground and then you're at her door and buzz the bell of the dingy apartment building and she says I'll be right down and you wait in the car as she comes with a duffel bag and another shoulder bag in her hands. She looks clean and for the first time there's something else than age showing on her face, maybe hope, but she sees your face and you're not old enough to mask your worry.
"Something's wrong," she says as you help her load her stuff up, Sam quiet in the back seat and like a god damn movie timing suddenly she's grabbed and hurled against the wall and gashes are on her. You won't see the gushes till much later, but you hear the noise her body makes as it breaks on the wall. You have your rock salt gun and you want to shoot but it's night and there's fog and there's Sam in the back seat and the screaming, so you hand him the one gun and run off with the other following her voice. That's when you hear Sam screaming too, screaming that it's in the fog and shooting and you have to make a choice because ghosts move fast, faster than you can and they don't like unfinished business. And you can't be in two places at once.
So you make the choice. And it's not even a choice because there was no doubt to begin with as you shoot towards the car. You jump in, Sam unharmed and hit the pedals trying to make out where you last heard her. You don't care about the havoc you made. This is a neighbourhood where people don't open the windows when there is screaming and might not even call the police up.
The fog is clearing. You realize it almost with dread when you hit the break.
There she is, slumped against the back street. With dumpsters and loose flapping newspapers and shadows and dirt. And blood. Pools of it, around her, soaking the ground and some of the dumped cigarette ends. There are fags of cigarettes where you're standing too and that strikes you as the most ironic of all somehow but your mind will process it much later.
She doesn't look too old and she doesn't look too young anymore. She looks ageless. She looks dead. The female Ripper never had time to mangle her to pieces despite the blood and you somehow know that dad consecrated the ground. Just not in time.
You get back to the car, caress Sammy's cheek and don't answer his questions about where she is. Then you drive back to dad.
You're the only people at her funeral. You find it hard to cry and you find it hard to choke down the sorrow. You know it's not love, even if you loved her just a little bit.
There is no fog this crisp blue-skied morning. Dad sends Sam in the car, and you feel his hand slink away from yours as carefully as it had slunk in, as if Sammy knew how you're feeling. He probably does, even if he's younger than you in more than one way.
Dad doesn't say much but you know by the way his arm drapes around your shoulders that he knows about the bathroom.
"How did you know?" you ask and even in your grief you feel slightly embarrassed.
"I'm your father," he simply replies, and you want to tell him that it's alright, she had a condom with her, showed you how to use it if that's what he's worried about. Instead you lean your head against him and his body bears your weight with tenderness.
"People don't like to be alone, Dean," your father says. "People are scared of it. You gave her more than she ever had."
"People don't want to die alone, either," you reply, and feel manhood structuring itself on cornerstones such as watching your mother burn up in flames and bathroom rituals negated by ghosts.
"We didn't save her, dad. I didn't save her."
Your father's arm becomes tighter around you.
"You did the right thing, Dean. You had no other choice. If there's one person at fault here, it's me. I thought that it was over when we burnt the bones. I should have consecrated her old turf sooner. If there's one person to blame, that's me."
He pushes you aside, swerves you so as to face him.
"This was all my fault, Dean. Do you understand?"
At fourteen you're already feeling much, much older. She wasn't your first kiss, but she was your first cigarette and your first lay and she was linked to death. And even at that moment you have a small inkling that death will follow you every step of the way.
"Do you understand, Dean?" your father insists.
You nod.
"Yes, sir."
You would never lie to your father. Still, years later, after all those miles, all those ghosts, all those women, when you look in that mirror (mirrors all around you like a nightmare of potent bad luck), you cry tears of blood, remembering hers.
-The End.