When you make a salt circle
it has to be thicker than you think
deeper
the grains piled high
because the tiniest gap
the tenth of a millimeter
and the spirits can squeeze through.
We have to put the kid in the box, Dean says.
It's not
because he hates Jack. It's for Jack's own good.
For everybody's good.
He doesn't know his own strength.
Jack's not himself, says Castiel.
Sam thinks, he's a baby. He's a baby, he's two years old.
Sam said to Nick, You can burn.
Jack burned Nick up from the inside out.
You're a good man, Mom told Sam, before Jack disintegrated her
into a dust-field fifty feet wide.
I didn't mean to
he said
when Sam found him
Dean found him
with his hands in the ashes, trying to raise the dead.
Sam remembers that feeling,
hands in the soil.
Dean's body six feet under
unsalted, unburned.
You're a good man.
You can burn.
Nick crunched a rock into Sam's skull and it
jarred
things
loose.
Jack goes into the box with his eyes wide open.
I'm sorry
he says.
The clang of the panic room door
and the unforgiving smack
of its iron walls
against Sam's flesh.
The endless whirr of the fan.
Sam sat with Jack while he was dying but it is Dean
who hammers the nails
into the coffin.
The nails are iron
and there are sixty-six of them. Dean's jaw is rigid
and there is sweat
staining dark over the back of his shirt.
Jack doesn't make a sound.
Instead
there is only the metallic ring of the nails.
Sam does not leave the room.
When the box is done Dean throws the hammer
and it leaves a white gouge
in the wall's gray concrete.
Not so perfect now,
Nick said to Sam
as he beat him with the rock
and Sam thought
about the ways he would have maimed himself
if it would have made a difference.
The panic room and the door locked
and Sam was calling
and nobody came.
Bobby-not-Bobby when they find him says
He killed Mary
that sonuvabitch should die.
I need you on board with this,
Dean says to Sam.
Jack can't die. He will live forever.
But he goes into the box
quite willingly.
When Dean leaves the room
Sam makes a scratch in the carvings on the lid.
They are many and intricate
they are each important
and Sam's scratch is tiny
no thicker
than a grain of salt.
