The Weight of the Last Supper

Gothic

The bread tasted of wet wool and copper. It is a heavy thing, the crust that sits upon a dead man's chest, soaking up the residue of a lifetime spent in malice. When I swallowed the last crumb, the silence in the room shifted. The cold didn't just touch my skin; it began to move inside me. It starts in the throat, a thick, oily slide that refuses to be digested. I can feel his cruelty now. It is not a memory or a ghost; it is a physical silt, a grey sludge that migrates from my stomach into my bloodstream. It settles in the marrow of my shins first, making my legs feel as though they are filled with wet concrete. I try to breathe, but the pride he carried for seventy years has manifested as a calcified knot behind my sternum. It presses against my lungs, rhythmic and insistent, like a second, slower heart that beats only for the things he stole. I can feel the greed knitting itself into my fascia. It is a thousand tiny, needle-like hooks catching on the muscle, pulling my shoulders forward, bowing my spine. He was a mountain of a man, but his sins are heavier than his flesh ever was. There is a specific, tactile filth to a man who broke his children for sport; it feels like shards of glass suspended in thick syrup, grinding against my joints every time I shift my weight. My skin feels too tight. There is a humming under the surface, a vibration of old screams and hushed lies that have found a new home in my capillaries. I am a vessel now. I am the soil where his rot is planted, and I can feel the roots digging deep, winding around my ribs, claiming the spaces between my organs. It is a biological invasion, a parasite made of moral decay. I sit here in the dim light, listening to the sound of my own blood thickening. My fingers are stiff, the knuckles swelling with the weight of the secrets I now carry. It is an agonizing process, this settling. The body was not meant to hold so much darkness in such a small space. Yet, as I look at the body on the table, I see the change. The grey pallor of his skin has softened. The hard, pinched line of his mouth has finally relaxed. He is light now. He is empty and clean, floating away on a current I cannot see because I am the one holding the anchor. My bones ache and my breath is shallow, but the house is finally quiet. The air in this room feels breathable for the first time in decades. It is a fair trade, I think, to carry the stone so that the village can finally sleep without dreaming of him.