I was in a long line outside a brick building. The street was made of dirt and the air was sticky and hot. My hands curled in fists around the food-stamp vouchers I’d gotten from the church and my body was quivering with suppressed rage.

The white man pushed me again, his grin showing blackened teeth. “I said back of the line, boy.” The four men behind him laughed as they all attempted to cut in line.

“No sir,” I said through gritted teeth.

His friends stopped laughing. Frankie Jonas put his callused, black hand on my shoulder in warning. “Don’t go losing your head, Vernon.” He looked at the white men. “We don’t want trouble, sir. He’s just tired and hungry, like everybody else. Don’t mind him.”

“The hell you say!” I yelled so loud most of the line ahead of me turned around to look. “I’ve been here since before sun-up and all day these fools have been jumping in front of us. I’ve got a family too. My wife needs something to eat. She’s sick. I’m not letting these fools jump line anymore!”

The white men’s eyes glinted. More men from ahead in the line stepped out to join them as they started yelling threats and curses. Freddie and the rest stepped back then, distancing themselves from my madness.

The first blow caught me in the gut, but I barely felt it. I let out a howl of rage and jumped on the closest white man. They were all between me and food for Sadie. I didn’t care if they strung me up later. I had to bring food to my Sadie.

Every muscle in my young body screamed with pleasure as I let loose the terrible anger that had been building in me. Anger at these men and others like them. Anger at my measly crops that wouldn’t grow. Anger at the second child we’d lost in a year. Anger at Sadie for letting herself die. Anger at myself for not catching the consumption so I could die with her.

The man’s face looked like so much meat. I felt his cheekbone slice my knuckle as it caved under my pounding fist, and still I didn’t stop. His flailing limbs had gone limp long ago. There was a pale arm around my throat pulling so hard I couldn’t breathe, and I still pounded into that once white face with every ounce of strength and rage I had. People were screaming and running. Freddie and the others had long since run off. I could hear a wet sound every time my fist kissed where his thin lips had been. It hurt. It hurt more than anything I’d ever felt.

I jerked back from Vernon with a yelp of pain. Shaking, I collapsed to the floor. Vernon mirrored me a few feet away. I blinked through the blur of tears in my eyes. All of it had taken place in a second, but for that brief moment I had been Vernon.

I cringed away from Sarah as she knelt next to my head. I wanted to ask what had happened, but was still fighting off the rage that had just consumed me. I saw the woman Sadie in my mind, barely breathing in a small bead, and needed to get back to her, to get her food to her so she’d eat and be strong again.

Turning my head painfully, my eyes met Vernon’s. He had already recovered and was mopping his head with his handkerchief. It had a monogram of initials on it. They read S. R. H. It took me three tries to speak. “It hurts.”

Vernon’s hands were shaking slightly as he folded his handkerchief and put it away. “I told you it did. Sorry you had to see that. Haven’t had a new courier in nearly ten years. We got it full-force just now because we touched bare skin. Sorry, boy. I’m old. I forget you don’t come knowing how to dull it some. How can one person be so miserable?”

I sat up still shaking slightly, resisting the urge to vomit again. “You… You didn’t see what I saw?”

He shook his head. “I ‘magine you saw some fool black boy making the biggest mistake he ever made. That was me, mine…my sin. Wrath if you couldn’t tell.”

“I could tell,” I mumbled, remembering the scalding anger.

Vernon snorted. “I saw you sitting in a chair. You were looking off like you were brain dead, but you weren’t. Everything around you was moving so fast I couldn’t see none of it, but you just sat there, still as a statue. I’ve never felt so hopeless. I was a black man in the depression and I have never felt so miserable and sad. What do you have to be sad about, boy?”

Shrugging, I rubbed knuckles. I could still feel phantom scrapes and bruises. “Is it always that bad, feeling someone like that? You said we have to feel other soul’s sin to get out of here. I’d rather give up my light I think.” I shuddered.

“No,” Connor said firmly from across the room, “you wouldn’t.”

Sarah scooted closer to me until her legs were pressed against me and I relished the wash of happy wanting that covered me, head to feet. Anything was better than that rage and pain still lingering.

She curled a lock of hair behind her ear before she spoke. “It is painful, yes, living through another’s sin. The pain of a charge’s sin is much less, however, than that of one of your fellows. Our sin exudes from us constantly, reaching out to brush any that are near us. For a charge, this brush of sin in one sided. The effect causes them to relive their own sin, taking us with them, but they do not feel ours. I do not know why. When the sin of two couriers brush one another unchecked the result is a painful experience of sin for both parties. You will learn to dull your sin in time until the effects are as mild as what you are experiencing from me now.”

I stared down at my knee. The warm skin of her leg had been resting against my leg for over a minute, and there had been no weird flashbacks. All I felt was that same unfamiliar feeling of restless joy, coupled with shock and confusion. I had a million questions, but no energy to ask them. My brain felt overloaded. I was so tired I felt like I could sleep for days, but adrenalin still pumped through me from Vernon’s “brush”. My vision was foggy around the edges the way the world looks dreams. For the second time that day I burst into uncontrolled laughter.

My muscles ached as I gasped for air, but my chest seemed to continue expanding and contracting in violent laughter of its own accord. Nothing was particularly funny. I wasn’t even sure why I was laughing, other than the fact that for the first time in my life I could honestly say that I wasn’t bored, and I was dead.

By the time I caught my breath everyone was staring at me. Even Connor looked mildly concerned. I tucked my cigarette pack back into my jeans and took a deep breath. I was so worn down I was willing to accept the fact that I was dead, but I still couldn’t wrap my mind around the mechanics of this… purgatory. It was too much psychic, spiritual crap to take in at once and properly retain. So, I skipped all the weirdest stuff and asked the question that had been on my mind since before I woke up.

“So,” I asked the room at large, “who’s this Rod guy? That girl said he was after me. Why?”

Alex rustled something in his trench coat pocket nervously. “Well,” he said, “He’d our Greed.

Dumbfounded, my eyes widened to the point of pain. “Huh?”

Alex opened his mouth to answer but was interrupted by the door closest to him bursting open with such force that hit the wall. I felt a cold gust of wind before something tumbled through the opening and the door slammed shut hard enough to make my ears ring.

The pink-haired girl picked herself up from the floor, throwing aside a dirty black hoody and a pulling a knit cap off her head. Her eyes scanned the room until she found me.

“Good, you’re awake,” she said. “Come on, we’ve got a boat to catch.” She grabbed my wrist in a firm grip. I heard someone yell “NO!” before I fell into Mikayla Marie Massy’s greatest sin.

***

There wasn’t a hole inside me that needed to be filled. I was the hole, and there was no hope of ever filling me.

I was in a house, at a party, and there were so many people there but I couldn’t see their faces. I didn’t want to. I walked from room to room smiling with my hand out. Lips moved but no sound came out. I ate what they gave me, but I needed more if I had any hope of keeping the hole from getting bigger. The only voice I could hear was my own as I searched for anything to make it stop. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.

The hole was stretching. It was getting harder to hold myself together. I could feel my stomach sliding to the floor. It was getting harder and harder to breathe. The pills were kicking in. I giggled as I cried, sliding down a wall, trying to catch up with my stomach. The hole was tearing through my chest now. The pain was nice though, something new.

I looked at my pale face in the mirror. Someone was passed out in the bathtub. My hair was a bright and happy pink, but the hole didn’t like it. I couldn’t remember what color it was underneath the dye. Maybe blue, like my eyes. They looked back at me, ashamed and hungry.

Cold. Cold as fuck. Someone was slapping my face. They were waking the hole up. I started giggling. Maybe if I laughed the hole would stay asleep a little longer. I wished they’d go away.

“Hey! Look at me. Are you okay?” A guy in baseball cap looked down at me, worried. He told a girl to get the car.

I was propped up against a kitchen counter. Bottles rolled across the floor as I fought the hands that were pulling me upright. The hole tore viciously through me. I wondered if they could see it. I screamed. “Leave me alone! You’re making it bigger!” I collapsed on my side crying.

The guy and his hat disappeared. I fumbled around the floor until I found a half empty bottle. The hole went still as I brought it to my lips. The vodka made my eyes water and my chest tighten, but I welcomed the feeling with relief as my vision darkened again.

“Whoa there! Enough of that I think.” My fingers were curled around thin air. The bottle was gone. Hat guy shook my shoulders hard.

I looked up at him, angry. The hole was getting bigger again. I needed more to drink. I wriggled under his hands reaching dumbly for another bottle and fell face first onto the floor. The hole was screaming. I was too.

“Here. Take this.” Hat guy grabbed something off the bar and put it into my hands.

It was cold and heavy in my fingers. The hole went quiet. I looked down at the tarnished sliver bottle opener. I could see myself in it. My pink hair and nose ring and blue eyes stared back at me, misshapen.

Hat guy closed my fingers over it tightly. “This is your sanity,” he whispered. “You can’t close your eyes or look away, because if you do you’ll lose it. You don’t want to lose your sanity do you?”

I stared at him and shook my head. The girl came back into the room. She put a blanket over me. I looked at my hands and squeezed the bottle opener until I could feel it cutting into my hand.

The hole was gone. I watched lights whirl by above me and was glad. My hand was bleeding now where the bottle opener cut me. The Circle Jerks were screaming scratchily through a car stereo. I hated this song. The hole ripped through me with sudden force. The bottle opener slipped from my fingers as they went slack. The last thing I heard was it hitting the floorboard.