The Sin-Eater

The woman was filthy, and Ancho slammed the door in her face. Ancho's mother gasped and covered her mouth, weeping eyes wide. "What are you doing?"

"It's just some homeless--" Ancho had to move as his mother's skinny arms pushed him out of the way, expensive pumps slipping on the slick linoleum as she opened up the kitchen's maid door.

The wretched visitor was still there, surrounded by the pungent fumes of neglected rest stops. "I'm so sorry, your ladyship," Ancho's mother said. "Please, forgive my son his ignorance."

The stranger smiled with cracked, black lips, her teeth the color of Hollandaise sauce. "I'll be back for it, one day."

Ancho had seen his mother aggressively ignore similar people on the street, but here she was inviting one into the pristine home, asking if she needed anything, offering up iced tea. "Excuse me," Ancho said, a little louder than he intended. "Did you know my father?"

"Ancho!" his mother hissed.

The stranger turned her yellow eyes on him, and Ancho wondered what sort of hideous diseases were festering beneath her sallow skin. "I am here to provide a service," said the visceral visitor. "I see I am already imposing on your time."

The putrescent pile of rags made her way up the stairs without directions or permission, while Ancho's mother shot him a look even dirtier than their guest. "Why are you so rude?"

"Well, I learned from the best!" Ancho hissed. "Who is she? She stinks like a Las Vegas urinal!"

"SH!" Ancho's mother glanced up the stairs, in time to see the mud-colored coat tails disappearing into the room where Ancho's father was. Turning back to her son, Ancho's mother said, "She is a sin-eater."

A snort of laughter lodged in Ancho's nose. "That sounds filthy."

"It's not a joke!" Ancho's mother fidgeted with her pearls, working around the gold clasp from the back of her neck. "I...your father knew he had a camel in a needle's chance of a worthwhile afterlife--"

"A worthwhile afterlife?" The laugh made it all the way out, shockingly loud in the quiet house. "That bag of trash is supposed to sneak Dad into Heaven?"

Ancho's mother shook her head, her lips collapsing into a worrying line. "Your father asked for this. It's for your benefit as much as his. And when my time comes, I want the same thing, too."

The string of pearls snapped, and Ancho's mother marched out of the room, determined to escape before displaying something so unrefined as human emotion. Ancho knew better than to follow her, so he made his way up the stairs, to the room where his father now lay.

The stranger's odor permeated the confined space. 'Like death' was how offensive scents were sometimes described, but to Ancho, this flatulent tramp smelled like life, and all the horrible effluents and excretions that went along with it. "What the hell's that?"

The vagrant lady glanced over from her place in a rocking chair. "It is dough."

"I can see that," Ancho said. "What's it doing?"

"It is rising."

"What is it doing on my dead father's chest?"

The rhythm of the rocking chair was like another heartbeat in the room. The filthy stranger said, "Right now, that dough is an unformed thing. It takes on everything around it like a sponge, like an innocent mind. It will absorb your father's sin as it rises from his body."

"And then you eat it," Ancho guessed. "Where'd you get the flour and yeast?"

The sin-eater turned to stare at him. As repulsive as she was, covered in layers of caked-on grime, Ancho felt a shudder of electricity from her eyes, touching on something lascivious he instantly fought to suppress. "As it happens," the stranger said. "Every stalk of wheat on Earth belongs to me."

Ancho scoffed. "Well, shit my ring. I didn't recognize you as a millionaire."

The rhythm of the rocking chair did not cease. "Not the money. Just the wheat."

The dough continued to rise. Ancho sat down to watch it; the process fascinatingly unsanitary. "Do you sing a hymn, or something?"

"Are you this man's only son?" the sin-eater asked. "You have no brothers or sisters?"

Crossing his arms, Ancho said, "One half-brother, and two step-sisters. They're on their way, I just live closer."

"You all loved him?"

"What kind of question is that?" The woman looked at him, and Ancho got that queer knot in his stomach again. "We tried," Ancho said. "He didn't make it easy for us."

The rocking chair creaked beneath the stranger. "It's a sacrifice. Loving someone, in spite of themselves." She used a paddle to scrape the dough away from the dead man. "It is time to bake."

Stepping down into the polished kitchen, every surface white tile and stainless steel, Ancho watched the disheveled visitor leave a grimy handprint on the oven door. Ancho only ever remembered that kitchen smelling like Lysol lemon, now it seemed like an unknown, mouldering place. Clearing his throat, Ancho said, "I think you were offered some tea?"

The stranger turned her eyes on him. "I've been offered all kinds of things."

"That's a point, too," Ancho said, opening the smooth white refrigerator. "What's my mother paying you? There are faster ways to get cheap bread."

"I am not a bread eater."

Ancho set a glass carafe of amber tea down on the marble counter, and took a second to remember which cabinet held the cups. "That's a shame, owning all the world's wheat."

The disruptive stranger smiled, split lips over rotting teeth. "Every April, wheat fields are susceptible to a rust-colored fungus that corrupts the crop. There used to be a whole festival of people asking very, very nicely that I keep that devastation to myself." Not even knowing what that was supposed to mean, Ancho took two glasses down from the cabinet and lifted the sweating vessel of iced tea.

He dropped it, backing away from the carafe as it spun lazily in a puddle of condensation. The once-clear liquid was a murky cloud, thick with choking colonies of mold, fungal tendrils creeping from the mossy bottom to the black-capped surface. The fibrous blooms grasped and enveloped each other, twisting and spreading to the limits of their glass prison. Ancho scrubbed his hand where he'd touched it, unsure if he would ever feel clean again.

The pestilent visitor laughed at him. "Alright," she said. "I take it back." She reached out a twisted finger, a black crescent of filth beneath the nail, and touched it to the contaminated glass. Instantly, the odious growth began to recede, withering and shrinking until the golden liquid was once again pure. "Thirsty?"

Ancho shook his head, unable to close his shocked maw. "I don't trust it."

"No one ever does." The stranger poured herself a glass. "I took your father's sin from him; you saw me do it. You think he's getting into Heaven?"

Peering past her, through the window into the oven, Ancho said, "No way that loaf's big enough."

Sitting down at the table and sipping her tea, the pile of rags said, "Every culture in the world preaches redemption. Every person in the world doesn't trust it."

Ancho scoffed. "How can we? It all has to go somewhere. Look, people do messed-up shit, it matters. A slate that gets erased is different from a slate you never wrote on. When you hurt people, those people are hurt. You should know."

"I do know," the sin-eater said. "I'm the queen of messed-up shit. And a person who's healed is not like a person who has never been bruised. Have you ever tasted spoiled milk?"

Unable to remember, Ancho said, "I'm sure I did at some point."

"Did you give up on milk altogether?"

"I am sure I gave up on that carton."

"What if," the sin-eater said. "I took that spoiled milk, and took that spoilage upon myself. If I cleansed it, until it was pure and safe and nourishing again."

Ancho shook his head. "I wouldn't touch it."

"No," the stranger agreed. "But anyone else would, not knowing what it was. That's why people who suffered a great pain have a desire to start over. Because no matter how seamlessly they've healed, a skeptic still sees the 'sell by' date."

There were rings forming on the polished table. Ancho asked her, "Why would you do that? Why would you absorb the decay, when you could just replace the milk?"

The sin-eater wiped the table with her gritty hand, and it was as if her glass had never touched the surface. "Because we aren't talking about something that can be replaced."

The aroma of baking bread had eclipsed the lingering waft of latrine. Ancho helped the sin-eater take the bread out of the oven, the door groaning on a rusted hinge, and laid the loaf to rest on the dark induction stove top. Tantalizing steam rose in lazy wisps, misting the unblemished glass. It almost looked delicious, until Ancho remembered it sitting on a dead man's chest. "Why do you do this?"

Ascending the stairs, with Ancho following, the sin-eater resumed her vigil from the rocking-chair. Ancho realized that the stench resting in the stale air came and went with her; the dead man on the bed didn't smell like anything. "Tell me," the woman said. "Do you hate your father?"

"I don't want to." Shaking his head, Ancho said, "He hurt me. He hurt people all the time. I never got the chance to cuss him out about it." He winced. "That's not true. I just never thought I'd get an apology. Now, I never will."

The rocking chair creaked, back and forth, back and forth, while the vile stranger continued to fester. "I don't just consume the rotten things," the sin-eater said. "I create them. I incubate them. All of the blight, and decay, and filth, physical and spiritual. Every landfill, every cesspool, every shit pit crawling with maggots, my creation. I am in every foul deed and dirty thought. When you picked your nose and ate it, that was me. When you imagined your step-sister naked, that was me. I'm in the brain of every priest, and the pants of every politician. In Europe, they call me Robigo. In America, they call me Tlazolteotl. I hold the putrescent plague that devours the world, and I am worshipped for my power to contain it. And every time your father turned away from you, I'm the one that corrupted his heart."

The air was thick in the stifling room, crackling with the heat of a simmering storm. "Everything," said the sin-eater. "Everything that was rotten inside of him, everything that was putrid between you two, and the bitter disease that infected your soul, all of it, was born from me. And I have come to take it back."

The rocker continued to rock as the lady slipped out of it, crawled across the floor on her knees, and grasped Ancho's unresisting hands. Her yellow eyes bore into him, touching the unprotected sponge of his innocent mind. In a whisper, she said, "I'm sorry."

When Ancho opened his eyes again, the woman was gone. Picking himself up off the floor, Ancho looked down at his father, waxy and still, and smaller than Ancho remembered. The sight of the fragile figure had once stirred up a hurricane of betrayal, longing, and hot shame, but all the ugliness between them had been eaten away. Now, Ancho felt nothing. Actually...he felt peace.

There were voices in the kitchen when Ancho descended the stairs. In their clean clothes, with their bright smiles, were Ancho's half-brother and step-sisters, swapping stories around the table and laughing. "Hey!" said Ancho's half-brother. "There you are! Do you want some of this?"

They were sharing a warm, sweet-smelling loaf of fresh-baked bread.