Caroline Ashley

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Carry On

The only time I ever cry is when I listen to “Carry on Wayward Son”. The song plays on my tablet with every season finale of Supernatural, right when all seems lost and the Winchester brothers search for the strength to keep going. Sometimes one play through isn’t enough, so I skip back and listen again, leaving the valve open just a little longer. Dean Winchester cries more than I do. But he’s a hunter – he’s earned his tears.

Every day – even on school days – I wear an oversized red plaid jacket and a silver band on my right ring finger. I pull the sleeves over my hands, fabric rough against dry knuckles. In an alternate reality, Dean gave me this to shield me from the cold. He says he’d throw himself on the blade of a knife to keep me alive, my existence fuelling his.

Dad hates how I dress. He says if he wanted a boy he’d have had another bairn. I wish he had. It’s lonely at night, when the darkness sets in and his and Mum’s voices rise like crashing waves through the house. My ear buds are a dam. I listen to Dean tear himself apart to protect his brother and my stomach aches with an unfillable hole.

Mum kisses me goodbye when I leave for school, and we pretend the nights don’t happen. I walk with my head down, eyes on the pavement, scuffing my trainers as I go.

“Oy, fatso, get out the way!”

A boy shoves past me as we enter the building, elbow driving into my ribs like a stake. His mates snigger as I press myself against the red-brick wall, wishing I could sink inside it. I don’t have any friends except online – when I try in real life, I never get it right. They wrinkle their noses or roll their eyes or huff their fraying patience out into the air between us.

During physics, the new girl – Amelia – she draws a picture of an angel in a trench coat. She raises her head to the sunlight with a grin as she flashes it in my direction. Is she making fun of me? I’m never good at working that stuff out. I duck my head down, pretend not to see, as I roll the ring around on my finger. By the end of the lesson, I’ve sketched a devil’s trap across my wrist, my silver scars covered in blue biro edged with pink flesh.

I bunk off school for the rest of the day and go to the old church on St Paul’s Road. The latch is broken on the back door and the floor is littered with beer bottles and crisp wrappers. The daylight strips it bare: cream paint peeling like snake skin; crumbling plaster clinging to my fingers like grave dirt. A crucifix rests in the corner, abandoned. Safe on hallowed ground, I lay down on the dirt speckled floor and count the spiders hiding in the corners.

You can roll over and die or you can keep fighting, Dean says.

If only it was as simple as that.

But, eventually, I move. Walk back out into the world, like a hunter gearing for battle.

Amelia’s in the play park near the school, sitting alone on a swing. The slow creak of the chains scrapes across my nerves and I pause, watching the wind catch her hair. She’s staring at the grass, mouth downturned, but her head lifts and a frown plays on her forehead. Her eyes are red and her hands are clenched so tightly around the metal links that her knuckles flash white.

“You alright?” I call.

“What do you care?”

She turns away, dismisses me, like I dismissed her. I could run back home, hide in my room, wrap myself in a blanket and pretend nothing and no-one can hurt me.

I could.

Instead, I walk into the park, anxiety stabbing my gut, and I sit beside her on the other swing, the metal cold beneath my hands.

We glance at each other but she doesn’t say anything, and neither do I. My throat is severed, trapping all my thoughts inside. She kicks her feet, swings up in the air, then stops, nodding her head at my clothes.

“I got an autograph from Jensen once,” she says.

He’ll always be Dean to me.

“I was really there for Ian Somerhalder though,” she adds.

I look up, make a face. “Vampire Diaries, really?”

Her smile comes back and it lights up her face, like she’s really an angel being cast in heaven’s glow. She talks more, chasing the silence away, and I try to do the same: for once, I get the words right, and she stays with me till the sky turns shades of gold.

“See you tomorrow?” she asks.

“Sure.”

I walk home alone, playing the scene around in my head, trying to strip the good down to bad. But this time, it feels like there’s something that can’t be stripped away. Something worth fighting for. I hum the opening notes of “Carry On Wayward Son”, and instead of crying, I smile, wondering if that could be true. Warmth fills my chest, and when the sun sets, it feels like it’s still shining.

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Craft, Fandom, and the Road So Far: A Conversation with Caroline Ashley
– Interview by John T. Leonard


J: Carry On went through a few major edits from its earlier version. Can you tell our readers about a few important changes you made and why those revisions mattered?

C: Carry On was initially a much shorter piece that focused on the main character’s isolation and had Amelia reach out in an initial moment of connection. As I expanded the story, I realised that what I wanted to show was that the stories and the characters of Supernatural had helped the main character to find a moment of courage and take a chance, becoming a hero in her own small way, despite her past experiences of rejection.

C: The change in how she feels about the song at the end, is intended to show that something has shifted, just a little, inside of her. The song no longer represents all the things she wishes she had – a sense of purpose, a sense of connection to someone else – but instead a sign of hope, that there is a possibility of finding those things one day.


J: Why do you think we continue to hold on to certain shows, songs, or movies long after they end? Do you see them as fulfilling a mythic function, similar to modern-day epics?

C: I think we as humans have always looked for stories and songs that speak to us about our own experiences. The ancient Greek heroic epics are stories filled with suffering, where the gods do as they please and tragedy is out of human control, but what the heroes are able to control is how they respond to those tragedies. They rise up and fight, overcoming the obstacles put in their path and receive at least some form of reward in the end. The type of suffering we experience in the modern Western world is different to that of ancient Greece, but the human desire to make sense of our lives is still there. In my work as a psychologist, I see young people who feel isolated in school or at home, who don’t know where they fit in or what to do with their lives, and often they turn to music and TV to find other people who feel the same and to find a message of hope – that you’re not alone, that this can be better, that you can make your own future and it’s not all out of your control.


J: When you think about the hero’s journey, how do you interpret what it means to be “the hero” in the context of ordinary life?

C: In ordinary life, there aren’t monsters to slay, or villains to defeat, and there are a lot more shades of grey in terms of what’s right and wrong. I think a lot of people struggle with that, finding it hard to know what they want from their lives and finding it hard to find their place in the world. But I also see how powerful even small gestures can be in making our lives seem a little brighter – the friend who makes time to talk to someone at night, the teacher who gives extra support to a struggling pupil, the stranger who holds open a door and offers a smile. These small moments might not seem like part of the stereotypical hero’s journey but, in each one, we have a choice to act or not to act and our decisions can have a big impact on those around us.

C: What Supernatural does so well, I think, is that it shows how hard it is for Sam and Dean to play the hero each season. They suffer and hurt, they doubt their future, they question if it’s all worth it and they keep going anyway. In a society with increasing rates of mental health difficulties, I think characters like that speak to us, because they tell us that it’s okay to struggle with aspects of our lives and that the important thing, the thing that makes us ‘heroes’, is that we keep trying to be the best people we can be despite that.


J: Which Supernatural death (or resurrection) hit you the hardest?

C: I both loved and hated Dean’s final death in season 15. I was raging at the screen that he had been taken out in such a small fight compared to the ones he had previously survived. I watched Supernatural right from when it first aired, back in 2005/2006, and for years I had hoped that Dean would get to live a life beyond being a hunter, finally get his happy ending. I cried when I realised that it wasn’t going to happen. It was the ending he had expected for himself, but not the one that I felt he had earned. But at the same time, I also felt that it fit so well with traditional hero myths, where death and loss are an intrinsic part of the stories, with the reward often coming in the afterlife, rather than in this one. He also died satisfied with what he had achieved with the time he had been given, which is something that we all hope we’ll feel in the end.


J: What was your favorite monster of the week? Is there a monster of the week that you wish Supernatural would have featured, but never did?

C: The monster of the week stories are among my favourites! I really loved the Americana vibe of the earlier seasons, where hunting was just Sam and Dean on this long road trip across a vast country, living in run down motels and appearing in town on their Impala to save the day. One episode that sticks in my mind was Scarecrow from the first season, where it was revealed that the monster was a god that had been imported by locals who had come across from Scandinavia, similarly to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. I loved that idea, of our myths and stories following us wherever we go, and America being this melting pot of different monsters because of that.

C: I live in Scotland, and we have a lot of water-based monsters in our myths, being a much smaller country with a lot of coastline, so I would have loved an episode set in California or Florida where Sam and Dean head to the beach and face a kelpie or help rescue a selkie!

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Banner Art:
Image by Ryan McGuire, Pixabay, 2014