The next day Grady is at work hiding in his cubicle. On his computer is a spreadsheet and piled next to him is a stack of papers upon which there is data. He enters the data into the spreadsheet. It is mindless and simple and it is exactly the kind of thing he loves to do. It is simple enough he can keep working without talking to anyone. It is just complicated enough to keep him stimulated. He doesn’t have to talk to anyone and he doesn’t have to interact. He doesn’t have to run into anyone covered with the tarry black substance.

Things go along fine until lunch time. He gets up and walks toward the department refrigerator where he stores the lunch he made the night before. He has made a few friends since he started and he hopes to meet up with his friend Jason for lunch. Jason sometimes works through lunch or goes much later. Grady has become quite the creature of habit, however, and he goes to lunch at the same time. He can’t seem to help his stomach that he gets hungry almost exactly at noon every day

He walks down the hall. He smiles and waves at the right people. As he steps into the kitchen where the fridge sits he stops cold. The smile freezes on his face. This is a practiced gesture that he has perfected over the years. There, standing in front of the fridge, is a black blob covered with swarming, snaking, crawling blackness. It is like someone being devoured by a horde of black-tentacled octopi. He cannot even tell who is beneath the swarm of blackness.

“Hey there Grady.”

Grady’s smile remains on his face but inside his stomach turns to much. It is Jason. Jason is standing near the sink with a cup of coffee in his hands. If Grady concentrates he can see the shape of Jason standing there leaning against the sink. He can envision the cup of coffee there in his hand. Jason always used the Styrofoam cups the company leaves for them. He likes to drink the coffee with the red plastic stirrer in the coffee.

“Hi Jason. You going to lunch?”

Grady is amazed at the way his voice sounds calm. The tentacles are everywhere. As Jason talks clouds of blackness emanate from his mouth like he was smoking a cigarette. It oozes over his face and into his nostrils. It’s like the octopi are searching for a way into his head or into his body. How can he not feel it, Grady wonders? Do people feel that when they are close like Jason must be? Can they tell and have they learned to ignore the feeling? They must because Jason doesn’t appear to notice. Grady suddenly doesn’t feel remotely hungry. He just wants to grab Jason and shake him and tell him he’s about to die. How does he tell him? He can’t tell what it is that’s supposed to kill him/ W hat if it’s a brain aneurysm and there’s nothing he can do about it?

“What’s the matter, Grady? You’re looking at me awful funny.”

“Sorry, just lost in thought. So, are you going to lunch?”

“I have this file to run. I think I can put it off until later. I could eat.”

“Cool. I’ll be down the hall.”

Grady watches as Jason walks past him and down the hall. As he walks past the cubicles tentacles of the black substance that is covering him reach out and run across the fabric from the cubicle walls. Grady wonders how anyone around him cannot feel that. He watches as a woman walks past Jason and even stops to talk to him for a moment in a cloud of the blackness. She appears to feel nothing. When Grady can see her face and she emerges from the blackness she is smiling and laughing. If he knows anything about Jason he just asked her out for tonight.

Grady grabs his lunch and then walks next door to the kitchen into the room outfitted with small circular tables and orange plastic chairs. He sits down and pulls out the sandwich. His stomach feels tied in knots but he knows if he isn’t eating when Jason gets back he will have questions. A million questions are floating through Grady’s mind as it was.

Should he tell Jason what he was seeing? How could he expect Jason to believe him? Wouldn’t Jason just look at him and think he’s insane? Even if he tells him, would Jason be able to do anything about it? What if it’s something internal and telling him won’t solve the problem?

Jason returns in a swirling black cloud. He tells a joke to Grady and Grady misses it completely. Instead he feels the bits of his sandwich he has just eaten start to come back up.

“Hey, Irish. What’s up?”

“Sorry Jason. I didn’t hear what you said.”

“Daydreaming again?”

“Yeah, I guess so. I’m not feeling particularly well.”

“Ah, well, don’t give it to me. I’m supposed to be going out tonight.”

Normally this would be where Grady would make a joke about Jason’s sexual prowess. This time, however, he just throws down the remnants of his sandwich and puts his head in his hands. He hears the scraping of metal on linoleum as Jason slides out a chair and sits down.

“Hey, you must not be feeling well. That was a perfect chance to make a joke about my wang.”

“I know. Sorry.”

“Not a problem. Maybe you should cut out of here early. You do look a little pale.”

Grady looks up and sees Jason take a bit from his sandwich. The whiteness of the bread gets covered with a thick dark blackness. He watches as Jason takes a bit from the black lump. More blackness emerges from the gaping maw of Jason’s mouth. Tendrils reach out toward Grady. He feels the merest hint of a touch from one of them and he jerks back. The chair he is in scrapes against the floor. He makes a noise.

“Jesus, Irish. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

Grady looks into the blackness and he watches the tendrils extend toward him. It’s like the darkness senses what he can do and it’s reach toward him.

“Jason, there’s something about me you don’t know.”

“If you tell me that you’re gay I am not going to be able to finish my lunch.”

“No, I’m not gay. I’m a sin-eater.”

“What the hell does that mean? Is it sexual?”

Grady sighs. Nothing he says is going to get through to Jason. He knows this. He also knows Jason may never speak to him again. However, if the blackness around him is any indication then he won’t be able to talk to Jason much before too long anyway. The darkness is so black that he wonders if Jason will drop dead in front of him right now.

“I don’t expect you to believe me, Jason. You’ll probably think I’m crazy. But I have to tell you something and I am being completely serious.”

Jason puts his sandwich down. Grady concentrates and forces himself to see past the blackness that covers his face and sees Jason’s true features. Jason has a face that sometimes doesn’t seem to be showing any expression. Right now, however, his brow is furrowed and he looks concerned.

“You are succeeding in freaking me out, Irish.”

“That’s good. Look, Jason, the men in my family, going back centuries, have had an ability. We can…well…we can…absorb the sins of people who have recently died.”

“Absorb? What do you mean?”

“Back in the old days families would hire a man to come to their home when someone in the family was dying. A meal would be prepared for this person and he would eat the meal in the home or room or even on the coffin of the deceased. The idea was that by eating the food he would be devouring the sins of the person who had died. This was supposed to make it so the deceased would by-pass purgatory and head right into heaven with a clean soul.”

“Sounds like something someone very hungry made up.”

“That may have been the case in most instances. The thing is it wasn’t just a tale in some cases. While the whole eating thing is nice, it’s really not necessary. My father and my grandfather and myself, we can do it without actually having to eat anything.”

Grady can see the worry in his friend’s face turning into a strange mixture of concern and fear. Jason is starting to veer towards believing his friend Grady has become unhinged. At this point Grady wonders if he should abort his mission and just tell Jason it’s all a joke. He thinks he might even be able to pull it off. Then he lets his concentration slip and he sees the blackness again. If he’s come this far, he figures, he had better push through until the end.

“The ability comes with some other abilities on top of it. I can…I can see…”

He pauses here. He wipes his forehead with his hands. His palms are sweating and he succeeds only in smearing more sweat into his skin.

“Jason, I can see death. It’s around all of us most of the time. People with my powers, though, we can see it more clearly when someone is getting close to death. Or, more correctly, when death is getting close to them. It’s like a cloud that swarms around them. The closer death is the blacker that cloud is. When I touch that cloud of darkness I can see memories of that person.”

“Irish, I think you are starting to freak me out now. Why are you telling me this?”

Grady bites his lip.

“Jason, you’re covered with it. It’s thick and its black and its all over you.”

There is silence. Someone walks into the room and heads to one of the vending machines. She gets a soda. The sound of the machine is deafening when compared to the silence washing over him from across the table. There is a blank look in Jason’s eyes that Grady cannot identify.

“Why are you telling me this, Grady? What the hell?”

“Jason, you’re going to die. Judging by the color it may be soon.”

“And what am I supposed to do about it? Can you tell me what’s going to kill me?”

“No, it doesn’t work that way.”

“Then what possible good does it do me to know what you just told me? Jesus, how am I even supposed to believe this?”

Grady reaches out and grabs Jason’s arm. Memories immediately flood him. So many come smashing into his head he lets out a noise of pain.

“When you were a kid your dog got out. You loved that dog. It was a golden retriever. You and your sister went looking for the dog. It wasn’t the first time the dog had gotten out. You found him several blocks away. People were all around and the cops were there. As you went running up to the cops you saw the cop pull out a gun and shoot your dog. People had reported the dog as a stray and one of the neighbors said the dog barked at one of his kids.”

Jason’s eyes are wide. He jerks his hand back from Grady. He stands up and pushes away from the table. He doesn’t say anything to Grady he simply gathers up the remains of his lunch and throws it away. He then turns and walks out of the room.

“Jason, wait!”

Jason doesn’t wait. He just walks away.