your children will come at you with knives; part 2.

[steeplechasers]

You pull back the curtains and look out into the parking lot, and the Impala is gone; the tire tracks in the snow are being gently covered now, by new-falling white, like confetti flakes.

Sam is sitting on the bed in his sweatpants with his bleeding heel propped up on the nightstand.

It's an awkward place for a bandage but you've bandaged worse. He watches your hands while they smooth the medical tape and the gauze in place over his Achilles tendon. It doesn't take long for a nice red blot to appear on the gauze.

“Don't pick at it,” you say. “Okay?”

“Okay,” he says. Instead he plucks the piece of dangling skin off the back of his right hand-no bigger than a fingernail, but nasty-he flicks it into the trash can across the room.

Anywhere else you'd have wanted to vomit, seeing that. But.

“Let me see your hands,” you say, reaching for more gauze from the first-aid kit Dad left behind, and he holds them out. There are still streaks of faint red where he washed the blood away. You'll resist tasting that, for now, you think.

He's still while you wrap up his knuckles and when you're done he looks like he's ready for a fistfight. He flexes his hands and watches the gauze crinkle at the crease of his palm.

You are lying, listless, in bed, when the sun rises, cold and clear. It's hardly a light at all.

Sam dozed off in the night-his gauzy hand is resting on your thigh. But now when you glance over at him his eyelashes are fluttering and his eyelids are drooping.

You've almost forgotten the agreement you made in the bathroom last night until Sam opens his mouth and speaks, and the wooden noise of his voice brings you straight back.

“I hate this room,” he says. “Let's go out.” His voice is clear but his eyes are still slipping and sliding, as if any minute he'll drop back into sleep. It's unnerving, or it would be, anywhere else.

“Out where?”

“Upstairs.”

You think about it, and the guardrail, and the high sun cutting through the snow and wind. Abruptly nothing sounds better in the world.

“Okay,” you say. “Upstairs.”

You sit on the edge of the tub while he showers. The water gets colder the longer he stands there. It comes off him in droplets and hits your back. You watch the space outside the open door and when he's finished he takes your spot and you climb in, and he does the same as you. Just looks.

Upstairs. The steps are just as slick as before and you watch Sam's feet carefully, almost expecting them to slide and for him to fall, to crack his head open on the banister. Brains and blood dripping down the frigid ironwork.

“What?” he says, when he catches you grinning.

To see the Fucking Couple standing at the head of the stairs does not surprise you. You have a deep backwards feeling that you expected this. Sam does not blink when he sees them. The both of you stop, two steps from the top.

They are leaning on the wall, as if they've been waiting for you. The woman with her long brown hair, and the man, who seems small beside her. They have their hands in their pockets.

“Hello,” says the Woman. Immediately you think she is the one who does the talking.

“Hi,” says Sam. You say nothing-you just look.

“Thanks for coming up,” says the Woman.

You don't bother to tell her that you weren't invited, that it was just a whim, because it wasn't. You know that, in your marrow.

You almost don't mean to speak until you are speaking, and it feels like someone has scraped the back of your tongue with their fingernails until words came up.

“You're witches,” you say, more of a statement than anything else.

The Woman smiles. The Man's eyes go hooded, and he looks at you, hard.

“And you're hunters,” she says.

You and Sam exchange glances. It isn't in you to run away from these people. It doesn't seem to be in Sam, either.

“Wow-ee,” says the Woman, shrugging her shoulders, her mouth like a knife. “How's your daddy, kids?”

“Gone,” you both say, in tandem, though you don't mean to.

“Too bad,” she says. She looks at her partner, and they seem to have that same kind of invisible rapport, the kind you have always had with Sam. You look hard for the threads of their thoughts, but you can't see them. “We were just leaving. We thought we'd say goodbye.”

“Did you follow us?” Sam asks.

“What do you think?” says the Woman.

“Your father ruined us,” says the Man. He is not as calm as her, you can feel that.

“Have you found our gifts yet?” says the Woman, and the Man immediately shrinks, as if she's yanked on his leash, whatever it is. “Your father has them. He stole them from us. We still think you should have them.”

You think of the plastic bag in Dad's duffel, the wax dolls inside. You think of the peppery burn in your chest and Sam's bleeding ankle.

“Did you put a spell on us?” you ask. It doesn't occur to you to be anything but straightforward. You realise your foot is still poised on the stair, as if you've frozen in place mid-ascent.

The Woman smiles.

“You did.”

“Only of sorts,” says the Woman. She steps forward, her boot crunching in the ice. She takes your chin in her hand, the way Dad had, last night, but gentler, though her fingers are the coldest things you've ever felt. She looks at you, and Sam is looking at you, too, ready, you can feel, to lash out if she tries to hurt you, to push her over the banister.

You think of her lovely-pale breasts. Somehow you feel weaker for having seen them. You've got no power over her.

“Have fun, babies,” she says, and lets go of you. “You can do anything you like out here.”

The Man follows her down the stairs, and the both of you take the last few steps, lean out over the guardrail, watching them emerge from the stairwell onto the white blank of the parking lot towards their hulking SUV, no bags, just the ends of her scarf trailing in the breeze. You watch them get into their car and drive away, out onto the highway, out of sight.

You stand there, hands freezing, Sam at your shoulder.

“Dean,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“If I fell from here and cracked my skull-” He points to the cold, hard sidewalk down below. “How far do you think the blood would go?”

You picture it. The SUV is already fading from your mind. You picture his broken stick-figure body in the snow, the splatter of red.

“Pretty far,” you say. “Let's go inside.”

It's four AM, and you turn on a lamp, and by its sick light you sit across the bed from Sam and open up a pack of cards. He wants to play War, so you play War-it's mindless, and quick, and ruthless, and just the kind of thing that seems suited to you, the way you are now.

Sam wins the first few turns but you win them back in no time. You're pulling cards from your deck so quickly that they're slicing into your fingers as they go, sluicing through calloused skin. It hardly feels like anything.

“How should we do it?” asks Sam. Five-three, he wins.

“Do what?”

“Kill Dad.” Two-king, you win.

He knocks his cards back into place. Your eyes land on the bottle of sleeping pills on the table, otherwise empty now, with all the books on the floor.

“We could drug him,” you say. It's practical. Four-ace, you win.

Sam twists his lip. “That's no fun.” Ten-nine, he wins.

“What would be fun?”

“He's always smacking you around. I hate it. It's like he thinks he can do whatever he wants, because no one else cares about us. Not in places like this.”

“You wanna smack him around?”

“ No ,” Sam says, with tension, queen-six, he wins, “I want to kill him.”

“We've got knives,” you suggest. “We've got everything.”

“We should have fun with it, is what I'm saying.”

“If we knocked him out,” you say, six-nine, you win, “we'd have time to do whatever we wanted. You know?”

“Yeah,” says Sam. “That's what I mean.”

Two sevens. War. One-two-three, jack-four, he wins.

“Shit.”

He gathers up the cards with his tongue between his teeth.

“We could take turns with him,” he says.

“And do what?”

“I don't know. Make him hurt.” Sam growls low in his throat when you sweep his card into your deck. It makes the hair go up on your arms and your stomach go hot. “I just really wanna make him hurt.”

The idea is electric in your mouth. “Yeah,” you say, “me too.”

You think about it. You don't hate your father. Sam doesn't either, you know that. But that doesn't seem to matter. Big shadow-man completely at your whim. For every time he'd busted you up or called Sam worthless. For your broken nose last fall. All of it. The idea's planted. Too sunk to pull out.

“Hey.”

Two-ten, you win.

“Yeah?”

“You think this is it?” You need to slow your draw down; you can feel parallel rows of paper-cuts on the inside of your fingers, but the sting is so nice.

“What?”

“Maybe they want us to hurt Dad,” you say. You mean the Fucking Couple, and he knows it. Nine-queen, you win. “I mean, he killed their coven. That's how it worked out.”

“Okay,” says Sam.

“And we're gonna do it. We're gonna give them what they want.”

“They did a good job,” Sam says, his eyes heavy-lidded.

“I know.”

“War,” says Sam, pointing to the pair of fours you've both put down.

One-two-three, six-five, you win.

“If we took turns,” says Sam, “you know. How would it go?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, tell me.”

“We have knives,” you say again. You look towards the bottle, and past the bottle, to the windowsill. “And salt. Salt hurts, in open wounds. I mean, we know that.” Six-jack, he wins. “If we knocked him out-if we had him laid out, like that-I mean, we could cut him all we wanted-a million little cuts, if we wanted-and salt-” Three-ace, he wins. “We could strangle him-you'd like that.”

Sam bites down into his lower lip.

“And we could-hell, we could burn him. Like, cigarette burns, you know? Those hurt like hell.” Four-four, war, one-two-three, two-eight, you win. “I think we've got a crowbar in the trunk. Yeah? Could use it on his face. His teeth?”

Two kings.

One-two-three; two kings.

“Sammy,” you say, waiting for his play, but when you look up he's sucking his lip between his teeth and trying to keep his eyelids steady.

Slowly his hand drags across his king, he picks it up, looks at it.

“Oh,” you say, seeing it, now, the flush on his face-the soft roundness between his legs. “Oh-ho, shit.”

“Shut up,” Sam says, and tears his king in half.

You can't even be upset that the game is ruined. “That turns you on,” you say. “Thinking about it.”

“Shut up,” Sam says, more of a squeak, now, but his hand slides down between his legs and palms at himself, and he covers his face with the other.

“Makes you hard?” you say, suddenly and irrationally obsessed, pressing your knees into the discarded game and leaning forward toward him. “Killing Dad?”

“Only with you,” he mumbles, and you want to kiss him, but you also want to watch, his bleeding knuckles oozing through the gauze and his slender fingers pushing down between his legs.

He peeks at you through his fingers, his lower lip trembling between his teeth.

“Don't stop on my account,” you say, more fascinated than turned-on, of course your new strange marionette-brain is cooing at you to fuck him while you can, but there's the other part, the part that thinks, murder, of all things, Jesus Christ.

“We could break his teeth with the crowbar, yeah,” you say, picking up right where you left off, and Sam covers his eyes again, squeezes himself. “Cut his tongue out too, if you wanted. Or his eyes. Shit, we could cut off everything.”

Sam curls forward, hand slipping, fingers finding their way into his mouth. You feel a thrill pass up your spine, lean closer, almost face-to-face.

“And we wouldn't want to go too fast-because like you said, that's not fun.”

Sam shakes his head, makes a soft sound, pulls his fingers from his mouth and holds them out to you, and shit. You won't say no to that.

His blood is leaching into the gauze, capillary action, so you can taste it, damp and cool, when you suck his two, three fingers into your mouth, scrape them with your teeth, he hooks them against your lower jaw and pulls you up close to him, and it's like you can see the flat expanse of the lenses behind his eyes, that's all there is, his insides are pushed up close behind his face, you're sure you look just the same. The both of you, look at you, in the room where you live, mindless, aroused, full of horrible thoughts, and Sammy all covered in scabs-if he let you, you'd pick those off him, one by one, open the gouge in his heel and mouth at it like a slice of aching fruit.

You need him to taste his own old blood on his tongue so you let his fingers go, kiss him, drag your hand up into his hair and yank, yank, harder than earlier, hard enough to make his face scrunch up in pain until it dissolves into freakish giddy laughter instead, he makes a warbling noise of happiness in his throat and you yank again-when you let go he bites down so hard on your bottom lip with all his front teeth, his eyes flashing and his grin spectacular, that blood rushes into both your mouths, you gasp, he pulls away, you spit your blood onto his tongue and he comes just like that. Like nothing.

You're dripping red down your chin and your shirt and his fingers are wet and his eyes are glazed over and you've forgotten where you'd left off in the story about killing Dad but it doesn't matter so much anymore.

Sam sags, eyes rolling, and tips his head back.

“Let's keep his teeth,” he mumbles, so low it's like he's almost on the edge of sleep. “Let's keep his teeth in a bag.”

“Okay,” you say.

Thirty-two little white things in the palm of your hand. You love the idea.

“Hey,” you say, remembering, and you roll off the bed, and you feel his eyes following you, and you reach down for the wax dolls in their plastic bag and hold them out to him.

“What are those?”

“Poppets.”

“Poppets?”

“From the witches. From Montana. Hey,” you say, “do you think this is what she meant?”

“Who?”

“The Woman.”

“Maybe.” He scratches at his head. He seems bored, now, bored and spent.

You open the bag, gently, just enough to pull one out. It's got green pins for eyes. Pieces of shattered tooth stuck into its face, a grotesque imitation of a mouth. Its hands and head are painted red. It chips off under your fingernail the way that blood does. You wonder whose blood it is. You think of Sam's blood.

“Break it,” says Sam, breathlessly. “See what happens.”

You think of your broken chess piece, Sam's ripped-up playing card.

You grip the poppet at each end and snap it in half. The wax comes apart softly, easily. You squeeze the head in your hand and the sharp yellowing bits of teeth bite into your palm. It hurts; you squeeze harder.

You pause. You wait for something.

Something bigger than the soft sticky wax in your hand, smears of red on your skin, the hum of the radiator, the hum of Sam's breath, you, in this room, standing. It should be here.

You exhale.

“I don't feel any different,” you say, you whisper, and Sam nods, like he knows; but this time there is a soft feeling of fear, fear of what that means.

You open your hand and bits of teeth fall out.

For the first time in this place there is a kind of real anticipation in the room where you live. You and Sam, sitting on the edge of the bed, faces towards the window, waiting for the sun, waiting for your father.

More and more you feel that this is the right idea, in some way. Already the agitation is seeping out of you as if it knows it's going to find release soon. And Sam isn't picking at his skin anymore-he's just watching, eyes bright and alert.

There enters into your mind a thought-that when you're done with Dad you're going to fuck Sam so hard he can barely stand, on this bed, right here, so that when he turns his head he'll see Dad's body watching you, God. He's never been more beautiful to you than when he was touching himself to the thought of capital murder. Nothing sounds more perfect.

The bottle of your father's sleeping pills is sitting in the middle of the table, directly in front of you, like a still-life ready to be painted.

“When we're done,” Sam says-or whispers-“where are we gonna go?”

“Anywhere,” you say. “Anywhere that ain't here.”

You know his next question is what will we do, but he doesn't ask it, because he knows you don't have an answer, and you don't. It feels, to you, as if the world does not exist outside this motel. Nothing is bigger than this motel. The road at the far side of the parking lot feels like the end of the world to you.

“Sun's coming up,” Sam says, and it is, but only bleakly.

You see the lights coming in the dawn-darkness, the headlights rounding into the space where Dad parks, and you move like shadows, and as you go towards the door you catch your hand on the huge lamp by the bed and pull it from its socket. Your heart is not pounding as you had expected. In the very back of your mind there is an undercurrent of doubt, and undercurrent of fear of Sam's spidery silhouette in the blank window light, but it isn't strong yet, it's not back to you fully yet. You broke the wax and it broke something in you but it didn't break enough.

And the doll in the shape of Sam is still lying on the floor, studded in fingernails. Vicious.

Dad's key turns in the lock. You are holding the lamp in your hands. Sam is looking at you from the other side of the door, his eyes a smear of colour in the dimness, looking at you, almost beastly, ravenous.

The door opens. Dad's bulk moves inside. Sam gives a wild whoop like it's Cowboys and Indians and you raise the lamp and smash it over your father's skull.

He is lying face-down on the floor when you go outside. Together you open the Impala's trunk against the brunt of the wind and dig down beneath the false bottom. You hand him his crowbar, a Bowie knife, newly-sharpened. For yourself you take the machete Dad gave you on your seventeenth birthday, a canister of salt.

You cannot think about this. You know that Sam isn't thinking, either. It's a job, now. The mass of man on the floor is not your father at this moment.

You each grip an arm and drag him into the room, and Sam shuts the door behind his slack feet in their boots, dragging ice across the carpet.

Hauling him up is hard, but you manage. Together your prop him up, like a broken doll, against the foot of the bed. His head hangs limp. In the early-morning light you can't even see his face but for the shadows in his eye sockets. Now you're trembling, but it's anticipation, it's excitement, even though your conscience is slowly starting to flood back into you like adrenaline. You're pushing it down, you're trying to own it, you're trying to see, this is something you want, doll or no doll, this is something you are doing with your brother, this is something-

Sam hefts the crowbar in his hand like a batter at the plate. He looks down at your father, and then to you, and then to the poppet on the floor, in his crude waxen likeness, red hands, red head.

He hesitates. He seems to freeze inwardly. You watch him, feeling the grip of your machete growing slick with your sweat. He steps over your father's outspread legs as if they are not there, and for a minute, they're not-you could almost forget about him, about all of this, if it weren't for the shaking of your hands and legs. You need to get a blade in something. It's got to happen. The poppet is gone and you still want it. It has to happen.

Sam bends down and picks up the doll, looks at it-tilts it backward to see it in the dawn light. Then he sets it on the table, bites his lip, unsheathes his knife and cuts the thing in half, smooth as if he's slicing butter.

You watch it come apart around his blade. He stands there, looking down at it. The oppression has lifted from the room, very suddenly, but your throat is still sticking, you can still feel it in you, it's still there, where it matters.

Sam looks at you. His eyes are less dead than they were before, but his mouth is still a hard line.

“I don't feel anything,” he says, the crowbar dangling at his side.

“It's okay,” you say. There is a calm in you. You don't know where it came from but you welcome it. It's going to happen. Dolls or no dolls. It's sunk too deep, much too deep in you now. “It's okay. Come over here.”

He obeys, stepping over your father's legs again, and stands beside you, and you look down at him, lolling busted man, limp hands, boots pointed to the ceiling, helpless. You've never seen him so helpless. It thrills you and disgusts you.

It's almost worse, the magic gone. It's almost more urgent, more real, more human, the urge. You look at your brother's face and you know it's the same in him. His lip is twitching. His eyes are bright, like he's going to cry, but he won't, you know he won't, he'll take a swing before he cries.

“I want to,” he whispers. He lifts his crowbar an inch into the air.

“Me too,” you whisper back. You take a deep breath. This calm is so-unexpected. There is wax on the heel of your boot.

Sam hisses breath between his teeth, and his eyes sharpen on your unconscious father, and you feel your arm move your blade, like a machine that is too much a part of you, and Sam reaches out to you; and your little fingers tangle up, like children swearing oaths to one another.