Burning My Great-Great Grandmother’s Bones with Sam & Dean Winchester

Photo by Nikola Johnny Mirkovic on Unsplash

It started with mid-July chills items displaced a dancing porch swing on still days. By August she haunted my dreams, my baths, my commute; I started brewing coffee for two. In September, we ruined a wedding. In October, another — both brides barely legal and decades younger than their grooms. In November, she made me cancel all my dates with men. At Thanksgiving dinner, we spit in my uncle’s mashed potatoes when no one was looking. On Black Friday, we caught a man skulking around girls’ dressing rooms and broke his phone. Now, it’s New Year’s Eve and we’re riding in the backseat of the Impala. Led Zeppelin IV and coffee smells consume the dark, and she’s gone quiet. As if she knows; as if she’s ready. In a little while, we’ll watch the boys dig as snow falls. We’ll watch them crack open her pine box, douse her bones with salt and kerosene. Sam will look sad and say something gracious; Dean will say he likes her style, but it’s time to ramble on. I’ll say I’m sorry a man made her a wife and mother before her thirteenth birthday, that I hope heaven is real because she deserves peace. We’ll pile back into Baby after Dean drops a flaming matchbook on her ruptured grave. We’ll pour one out for her back at the motel, feast on pizza and Chinese food and pie — a wake of sorts for my great-great grandmother’s ghost. I won’t tell the boys when she visits my dreams that night. I won’t tell them when her whispers return in the spring — when she tells me don’t swipe right on him, pick a woman instead. I won’t tell them when we slash a man’s tires for cat-calling cheerleaders at the Independence Day parade. I won’t tell them what I knew deep down from the beginning: As long as my heart beats, as long as her bloodline survives, she’ll remain.

This poem originally appeared on Drunk Monkeys in April 2023.