To many, sin is just an idea. A religious or spiritual concept meant to describe an act or the condition of one’s soul. To others, it is something more real and tangible—it has a weight and substance to it like the gravitational pull of some distant black star.
For me, it was just a word. I had been raised in a strictly religious family in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma, so it was a word I was intimately familiar with, but one which held little meaning for me other than stirring up fuzzy memories of fiery sermons and harsh admonitions when I’d done something my parents found to be “sinful”. I wasn’t religious or spiritual myself, and if I had a soul, I imagined it must be a dim and shabby thing that I was getting little use out of.
When I went to visit my best friend Melanie the summer before our senior year of college, I’d had no idea I would be attending a funeral. My first indication was the line of cars filling her family’s driveway as I pulled up. When I got out and found Melanie, she tearfully explained that her grandmother had passed away the afternoon before. She apologized for not calling and warning me, but things had been chaotic and she was glad I was here anyway.
I had some misgivings about intruding, but in the end I stayed. I kept out of the way most of the time, occasionally giving Melanie or her mother a break from the steady line of family members and well-wishers who were coming and going for the next two days leading up to the funeral. I was amazed at how many there were—I knew her grandmother was old, but I could live to be two hundred and I wouldn’t know that many people. Melanie’s family had some money, but this was like the old woman had been famous or something.
Still, while the constant stream of people got tiring, it was nice to feel like I was of some use. I helped clean a bit and got groceries while they finished making the funeral arrangements. I was dreading going to the funeral itself, but I figured after that I should be good to leave. I wasn’t trying to be selfish, but I’d had my fill of family time, even if the family wasn’t my own.
It was the night before the funeral when Melanie came and knocked on my door before opening it a crack. “You still awake?”
“Yeah, I am. There’s so many weird noises here. Hard to get used to.”
Melanie gave a little laugh as she stepped in and closed the door behind her. “That’s called crickets, and they aren’t weird. You’ve just never lived anywhere that didn’t have a sidewalk.”
I shrugged as she sat down on the bed. “I guess not, but damn, do they not get tired?” She didn’t respond, and I saw the troubled expression on her face. “Everything okay, Mel?”
She frowned as she looked down at the floor. “I…No, not really. There’s this weird family thing, and there’s a problem with it, and Mom wanted me to ask you and I’m not really comfortable with doing that but now that I’m telling you about it, it’s kind of like I’m already asking you, which makes me a hypocrite or something.” Melanie looked up at me sadly. “Ugh. Sorry. I should go. I suck.”
I grabbed her arm as she went to stand up. “No, don’t be dumb. What is it?”
Sitting back down, she rolled her eyes. “Look, my grandma was super-old, right?”
I nodded. “Sure.”
“Well, apparently she was also super-crazy. She had some old custom from like old-timey England that she wanted a sin eater to perform a ceremony before her funeral.”
I stared blankly at her. “Am I supposed to know what the fuck a sin eater is?”
She gave me an exasperated sigh. “I know, right? According to Mom, there used to be these people called sin eaters that would perform a little ritual when someone died. They’d eat some food that was supposed to have the dead person’s sins in it, and that would transfer the sins onto the sin eater. What sense any of that makes, I couldn’t tell you. But I know my Mom is taking it serious, which means my grandmother took it serious. Where she got the idea in the first place, I couldn’t tell you, but it’s apparently a big deal.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Okay, yeah, that’s sounds super weird, but what does that have to do with me?” I already had a suspicion, but I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. “Are there people that still actually do that kind of thing?”
Melanie smiled weakly. “Apparently a few. And you can find just about anything these days, I guess. My mom found someone—a guy from Pennsylvania that is supposedly a “reputable soul eater”, whatever the hell that means. Problem is, he just called and canceled, and there’s not time to find someone else the night before the funeral.” She paused and swallowed. “So…well, Mom wanted me to ask if you’d be willing to do it.”
I felt goosebumps coming up on my arms. “Why me?”
She shrugged. “Well, you’re the only one here that’s not part of her family but close enough we’d be comfortable with asking. And I know you don’t believe in all that soul stuff anyway, so I guess Mom thought it was worth a shot.”
I shook my head slightly. “I…I don’t know. I never said I definitely don’t believe in a soul, I’m just not into religion and stuff. But even if I don’t, it seems like a kind of big, weird deal that I wouldn’t want to mess up. I don’t know that I want to be responsible for some ritual I haven’t ever heard of.”
Melanie nodded. “If you don’t want to, that’s cool. But the ritual is very easy. You just take bread we’ve got, place it on her chest, then pick it up and eat it. Then you take a glass of…I think it’s ale or something, sit it on her chest, then pick it up and drink it. There will be a coin on her throat, you take it off her throat and keep it. That’s literally it.”
She kept telling me details and trying to reassure me, so I knew she wanted me to say yes. I still felt uncertain, but why? It was a bunch of hocus pocus, and if it made Melanie and her family feel better, what was the harm in it?
Trying to not look uncomfortable, I gave her a smile. “Sure, why not?”
The funeral was being held in a large, non-descript building outside of town. I hadn’t seen any signs on the way in saying whether it was a church or a funeral home or what, and when I asked Melanie, she had shrugged. Said she thought it was just a building someone rented out for various functions. It seemed strange, but I’d never been to a funeral that wasn’t a little weird, and I already knew this one was going to get weirder once we got inside.
The main floor reminded me of some modern churches I had seen at past weddings and funerals, but we kept on going toward the back and down a flight of stairs to a large, cold basement. The space was empty except for a heavy metal table holding a cream-colored open casket. I felt the breath catch in my throat as I stepped forward and saw the woman inside.
She didn’t look especially old, or even that dead. In other circumstances, I’d have said she was in her early fifties and taking a nap. In these circumstances, I suddenly realized I wanted to be anywhere but there. Why had I agreed to this?
Melanie’s mother gave me a quick hug with one arm as she place a hunk of bread on the woman’s chest. I swallowed and looked at Melanie, who responded with a smiling nod. I had a moment where I almost rebelled, told them no, I was sorry, but this was too freaky, felt too weird.
But instead I forced myself to reach forward and take the bread. I ate it down in three fast bites, barely chewing before swallowing the tasteless, oddly greasy wads of dough.
Next was the “ale”, which Melanie’s mother poured into a metal tumbler she held steady on the woman’s chest. The clay jug she poured from looked old, with carvings that were hard to make out in the subdued lighting of the basement. I wondered if the grandmother had picked that out to be her ale jug too? Old people were so weird.
The thought distracted me for a moment, and I’d picked up the tumbler and started to drink before I had time to have more misgivings. I almost gagged as the liquid hit my tongue. It was overpoweringly sweet, and the taste and smell of it seemed to fill my head as I drained it down in a rush. Fuck that was nasty.
But almost done. What was the last part? Oh yeah, the coin.
I hadn’t noticed it before, but looking back down I saw there was an oblong coin of dark metal resting on the grandmother’s pale throat. I glanced at Melanie again, but she just stared back at me blankly. Ugh. No help from that corner. I just had to finish it, get through the funeral, and then I could get out of here.
The coin was surprisingly heavy in my hand as I picked it up, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it after I had it. Looking back at Melanie, I asked her where I should put it.
She shrugged. “It’s yours now. You can do with it as you like.”
I frowned slightly at that. What was going on? Why was she acting all weird and aloof now? Trying to lighten the mood, I held up the coin. “What kind of coin is this anyway?”
Melanie did smile slightly at this. “It’s called a tumerin. It’s very old, and it used to be very valuable. Some say it still is.” Her smile fell away as quickly as it had come. “Sorry, but we have some other ceremonial stuff we need to deal with. Private family kind of a deal. If you’ll wait upstairs, I can give you a ride back in a few minutes.”
I felt my eyes go wide in surprise. “Um, what about the funeral?” I looked from her to the mother, who was already arranging sticks in some strange pattern on the floor. “What about all the people who are coming?”
Melanie shook her head distractedly. “No, no. No funeral. We’re taking care of everything down here.” She glanced at me and then the way out. “If you can wait upstairs.”
Feeling confused and hurt, I dropped the coin into my purse and went upstairs. Twenty minutes later, Melanie came back up and took me back to their house. It wasn’t long before I was packed up and about to hit the road. I wasn’t sure if Melanie even wanted me to give her a hug goodbye, but when I started to make the gesture, she grabbed me up and squeezed tightly. For a second I felt better about things. She had just been grieving and stressed, that was all.
Then I heard what she was saying.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She pulled back from me at the threshold of the house, and before I could respond, the front door was closed. I thought about knocking, but what would I say? Whatever was going on, it was probably better just to leave it alone for the time being. So instead I got in my car and started driving home.
I had been driving for over an hour before I noticed I wasn’t alone in the car.
I saw it in the rearview mirror. Something that was more than a shadow but not fully-formed either, hovering at the edge of my view when I started to look away. At first I thought it was a trick of the light, but I realized I could see the sun streaming into my backseat. Could see it stop dead when it touched that shifting, midnight skin.
Gripping the steering wheel tightly, I began to feel the weight of the coin in my pocket and the burden of that old woman’s wrongs on my heart, but that wasn’t the worst part. No, the worst was how that thing sat watching me. Silently studying the new soul it had been bound to.
I could tell you about stopping the car and trying to run from it. About the weeks that followed when I tried to convince myself it wasn’t there. But by then it had started talking to me. Doing things. And it didn’t take long before I knew that any ideas of insanity were just wishful thinking on my part.
Melanie never came back to school. Never answered my calls. Three months later I went back to that family house of theirs…it was up for sale and there was no sign of any of them. When I saw that, I just sat on their lawn and wept for awhile.
Out of the corner of my vision I could see its shadow stretched long across the afternoon lawn. It told me everything would be all right. I just had to listen to it. Do what it asked. If I would do that, I’d never want for anything. Money? Sure. Power? You got it. But most of all, it added with its terrible, buzzing laugh, I never had to worry about one thing.
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