The Taste of a Dead Man's Debt

Monologue

Stop shaking. You are spilling the salt, and I am not wasting another pinch on a man who died in his own urine. Sit down. Watch the placement. The crust of the rye goes center chest, right over the sternum. The salt follows in a circle. The wine is poured into the shallow dip of the collarbone. It is not a ceremony, despite what the grieving widow thinks. It is a transaction. We are the filters. We take the sludge out of the pipes so the soul does not get stuck in the mud on the way out. Last time I had an apprentice who thought this was a spiritual calling, he spent three days praying for the strength to swallow the first mouthful. He lasted a week. He couldn't handle the weight in his marrow, and he left me to clear the backlog of the autumn fever deaths alone. I spent a month walking with a limp because I took on a particularly heavy load of greed from a magistrate. That is the reality of the trade. It is not light, and it is certainly not holy. Now, lean in. Smell it. The bread is fresh, but the air around the body is stagnant. When you eat, the taste changes. It does not matter how much butter is on the rye. If the man was a cheat, the bread will taste like wet wool and old copper. If he was a coward, it tastes of sour milk and cold ash. The worst are the ones who lived in silence. Those taste like iron filings and bile. Do not try to fight the sensation. If you gag, you leave a fragment of the debt behind, and the ghost will spend the next decade rattling the floorboards because you were too delicate for the job. You swallow it all. You push it down into the pit of your stomach and you let it settle. By tomorrow, your joints will ache. You will feel a heaviness in your chest, a sort of spiritual indigestion that no amount of peppermint tea can touch. Your blood will feel thick, almost syrupy. That is the cost. We carry the ledger of the dead in our own ligaments. Pick up the bread. Eat. And for heaven's sake, do not look at his eyes; they are just glass now, and they do not pay the wage.