8 - I Was A Teenage Sin-Eater

The candles around Anya were all black. She selected the one closest to being burnt out, and held it in her hand.

"I've gone back to the brothel a few times, since I left. Not to work, not to stay there, but to listen to the other women. They all have stories to tell. Sometimes about their clients, or their pasts. A few are more interesting. One young woman told me a story about how she got started in the business—an unusual tale I'll call

I WAS A TEENAGE SIN-EATER

Gina was 18 when she left home. School had no more hold on her, and her father told her she had 90 days to get a job or move out—preferably both. Which suited her fine. She was short, and tended to plumpness, with fine black hair that was impossible to style and olive skin that reminded her father too much of the Mexican manager at the QuickStop where Gina's mother had worked, before and during the pregnancy.

The young woman walked, suitcase in hand, right past the brothel. She told me later that she'd had an idea of hopping on the train, going West, or East, or anywhere that was far from Dagon's Hollow. Instead, she watched as the doors of the house opened and women walked out, all dressed in black, carrying a casket.

The girls of the House took care of their own, in life and in ****. Martina Macready had worked there for seventeen months. Her people were Scots-Irish, who had drifted west from the Appalachians, carrying with them their old songs and old traditions. Gina watched as the women carried their dead friend to the little cemetery that was across the railroad tracks—for the good people of Dagon's Hollow would not let whores in on their precious Eastside, in the old days, and even after the town relaxed the ordinance, the ladies of the House kept it up by tradition.

Something made her follow that train of women to the very gates of the cemetery. The grave had been dug, the casket placed, ready to descend. Then the Lady of the House raised her voice, clear and sharp so that it carried.

"Martina told me, as the cancer took her, what she wanted done," the Lady said. "No priest would shrive her, so she asked for the old way. That someone would assume her sins, and through penance and good work clear them, so that Martina could enter Heaven free and clear. And she put money aside for that purpose,"

One gloved hand held up a black leather wallet. "Five hundred dollars. To whomever eats Martina Macready's sins."

None of the ladies moved. All was silent. Even the wind was still.

Five hundred dollars might not seem like much. Yet it could buy a ticket to San Francisco or St. Louis.

So Gina stepped through the gate of the cemetery, and all eyes turned on her.

"I'll do it," she said.

Maybe the Lady of the House smiled. Maybe not. Gina told me how she walked right up to the casket, which was open. The body of the dead woman was naked, and on it had been placed a crust of homemade bread, dark brown against the white freckled flesh, right between the breasts. Dribbled on it were big, pale crystals of sea salt. When Gina bit into it, she nearly choked; too salty, too bitter. Yet with the eyes of all those sex workers on her, Gina **** it down.

The Lady smiled as she handed Gina the wallet with the money she'd earned. The first money she had ever earned in her whole life. And just then crossing back across the tracks toward's Dagon's Hollow struck her as a bad idea. So she left the cemetery instead and turned north, to where a road passed that led to the highway.

The trucker who stopped to give Gina a lift made clear his intentions: gas or ass. In the bed of his truck, Gina found herself pulling her panties down over her thighs as he rubbed warm lube into her virgin ass. The cock wasn't particularly big, nor the bearded and burly trucker particularly rough, but when you're a virgin the first one feels like a tree trunk splitting you in two. Gina clutched onto that wallet as she paid the other price for a trip, and she said that somehow, something helped her as the man thrust his sweaty cock between her cheeks until his balls slapped against her pussy. As if she stepped out of her body for a moment and someone else was there, ass in the air, taking her first dick.

That far took Gina five hundred miles away from Dagon's Hollow, semen leaking out of her poor hole the entire way. The truck stop was looking for waitresses, the dilapidated motel would rent out rooms by the week. It was a hand-to-mouth existence for a month or so, with that black wallet Gina's little nest egg, the secret stash of cash that could buy her escape if things turned bad.

The truckers were polite enough. Some were handsy as she poured the coffee, but Gina didn't really mind that. The hookers were what caught her attention. They tended to filter in around dusk, waiting for the trucks that stopped for the night. Tight skirts and tight shirts, no bras, who would go among the sleeping cabs and knock gently. Sometimes a door opened, sometimes it stayed closed. That was that. When the police came through, the manager would announce half-price coffee, and the women would scatter.

One night after a long shift, Gina was walking between two trucks when her hand knocked against a door. The door opened. Gina stood there, still in her waitress' uniform, and saw the heavy man with the shaven face. An older man who asked how much for a blowjob. A number popped into Gina's mind...and once again, it was as if she stepped outside herself. Watched herself clamber into that cab and undo the belt beneath the trucker's beer belly and free the soft prick within. Watched herself smile and fawn over the cock as she stroked it hard...and Gina, who had never sucked a cock before, felt herself peel back the foreskin and swirl her tongue around the swollen purple cockhead. Tasting the sweat of long hours on the road, and the loneliness and desperation of men who were always on the move. The throb of anticipation as the trucker gasped and pushed her head down, so that the glans hit the roof of her mouth when he unloaded a thick load of sperm, right on her tongue.

It tasted oddly familiar, as she choked it down.

When Gina's path brought her back to Dagon's Hollow some years later, the Lady wasn't surprised to see her. Or that she still had the wallet with her. She told Gina then that no one had ever opened that wallet, not since the house was built, or spent one dollar of that money. That somehow, every time it went out into the world, it ended up back where it began.

Anya reached into her robe and drew forth a dark leather wallet, the thin kind of billfold of an earlier era. Then she blew out the candle.