are we all such fragile things?

the cheap soap & the bar fight

My back has started to ache from the amount of time I've spent bent over, scrubbing the bloodstains out of my clothes with cold water and cheap soap. I'm sitting in the tub, too — making sure I don't get bloody-soapy-water everywhere. The bathroom door is cracked open and I can hear Wheel of Fortune playing on the T.V. Dean is inaccurately guessing all of the answers, shouting them out with a mouthful of food, and Sam is saying the right ones just before they are revealed. It's like he's got psychic powers, or something.

It's probably almost 8:00 in the morning, I'm only 3/4 of the way through with these clothes. The cold porcelain of the tub burns into my bare legs but my hoodie saves me from the even colder tile wall, however damp the fabric still is. The room is making a strange buzzing sound but its keeping my ears from feeling empty, so I accept it graciously.

I keep thinking about what happened earlier. 5:00 in the morning and I cut the head off of a real life vampire, then proceeded to have a strange man I'd just met tell me that there are more of them, and that he and his brother hunt them. Yes, the exact term they used was hunters. I start to imagine what my life would have been like if I was raised a hunter. I certainly wouldn't be as wimpy as I am now. Try putting me against a stray kitten and see who wins (hint: it's not me).

Monsters. They're real. The ghosts with their dead eyes and sunken cheeks. The demons with their black eyes and aggressive sense of humor. The vampires with their needle-teeth and superhuman strength. It's enough to put any average human in a coma.

But then again, I'm still sitting here; like a person who's just had their kidney harvested, scrubbing off blood from my clothes in a tub with two strange men in the other room. It all feels a bit surreal and frankly quite dangerous, but I'm having the time of my life. I laughed when Dean said I looked like an axe murderer. I stuck my tongue out at Sam when he said he would start calling me the "Machete Kid."

Why doesn't this bother me? And more importantly, how? You could chalk it up to be the fact that I fought for my life from my dad, or because I grew up on a farm. Either way, you would think I'd have some knowledge or abilities to have my fair share of fights. But I'd never gotten into a scrap once. I'd never picked up a weapon and used it, never blew off the fact that I'd been covered with the innards from some animal or other thing. This is not my blood, and yet I'm covered in it. It's supernatural.

Sam peeks his head into the doorway of the bathroom. "Hey, you finished yet?"

I shake my head and hold up the rag and the decaying bar of soap that smells like hair. "Nope. Not yet."

Sam sighs and glances behind him. Then he looks at me with those puppy-dog eyes of his. It's almost like he does it on purpose.

"I really have to pee."

Dean's voice suddenly comes from behind him; "just go while he's in the tub, we're all men here."

I think to myself, 'nature is calling the wrong number,' but I stand up from the tub and let the bloody clothes fall to the basin, stepping out and pulling the edge of my hoodie down to cover more of my thighs.

"It's okay," I say. "I need to stretch for a minute anyway."

I walk into the main section of the room and do exactly that, back popping synchronously with the closing of the bathroom door. I think Dean heard it, though, because he gives me a look of disgust.

"Why are you half-naked right in front of me?" He asks, turning his attention back to the T.V. and shouting "E!" right at it.

"We're all men here." I remark, teasing grin on my face as I cross my arms and wait for Sam to release the bathroom back to me. When I'm finally able to go back to what I was doing, I nestle myself back into the tub and begin to scrub once more. But the room goes quiet and I stop, listening intently.