Samās cast comes off in Youngstown, Ohio. Dean offers to buzz it off with a chainsaw and Sam rolls his eyes. They go to an Urgent Care instead. Dean sends Sam inside with a fake insurance card that says Scott Smalls and idles in the lot for a while, watching the sliding glass doors. Itās cold and he doesnāt want to be here. Thereās nowhere else to be. He wants to be sitting in there with Sam making fun of him for getting his arm fucked up by some co-eds ghost. He wantsā
A motel. Two beds becauseātwo beds. He orders pizza, extra mushrooms and sausage, and walks to the liquor store next door, and the clerk is one of those guys who looks at Deanās mouth before he meets Deanās eyes. Dean adds a bag of chips from the impulse rack to his pile and smiles with lots of teeth.
He has a drink. He refills his flask. He sits on the bed with his bags on it and looks at the other bed, and then he gets out his shotgun and cleans it, trying to focus: thereās the barrel in his hands and the smooth sweep of the brush, and the oil that needs applying here, and there. The heavy action of the trigger. He points the barrel at the purple carpet between his boots and pulls the trigger, feeling it, and makes the pew gun sound to the empty room. He lets the barrel sink down to the floor and lets his head sink, too, his shoulders tight and his spine feeling like itās slotted wrong into his back, somehow, like from the base of his skull all the way down to his tailbone itās an inch off. How long since he slept well? He canāt remember. That haunted hotelā
The pizza arrives. He tips the kid a ten and asks for extra parmesan. First slice hot enough that he burns the roof of his mouth like always. He eats it fast, anyway, and then sits back in the weird vinyl bucket chair at the table, tipping his head back. Heās tired. Tired, tired. The ceiling has a stain like a coffee spill, a pale brown lake spread on the popcorn, and he looks at it. Imagines a lake of coffee to swim in. Imagines adding creamer, sweetānālow. How itād swirl through the seaweed. Caffeinated fish. Fuck, heās tired. Heās tonguing the blister forming behind his front teeth when his phone beeps. Out in two minutes. Dean presses his tonguetip up into the tender spot where it aches, sits there and looks at the phone screen for a while, and then goes to get his brother.
