Sins On The Skin

I.

"I hope nothing. I fear nothing. I am free."

Nikos Kazantzakis.

If there was one thing Nathaniel Russ despised, it was funerals.

He hated the actors who played their parts mechanically, weeping and grieving over someone who they had buried long before he had been lowered to the ground. At funerals, everyone seemed to think that the only proper reaction was crying.

He hated crying just as much as he hated funerals for their pretentious nature.

It is a known fact that funerals are not for the dead, their souls have long since left their vessels, after all. No, those ceremonies were for the living. They offered comfort to family members who couldn't wait to receive a call from the family's lawyer after it had all been over.

If they never did receive it, they would curse their loved one, describe them with vulgar words and think even more grotesque thoughts.

Nathan despised his father's funeral. Much like the man himself, it had been bleak, serious, and suffocatingly colourless. The guests had arrived without any false pretence, they already knew the phone call from the lawyer would never come but they had to put on a fake smile and show how truly unaffected they were.

Not a single soul spilled a tear in his memory.

It hadn't been surprising. His father had never believed in Memento Mori, he preferred to act as he pleased without caring that one day he was going to die and no one would grieve his loss. Nathan admired him for that particular moral code.

It was one he ought to follow himself.

Robert Russ had never cared about what others thought of him, not even what his own son thought of him. He only cared for the fire in his veins and the monsters in his head. But that wasn't true, was it? If he had only cared for that he wouldn't have left them, he wouldn't have done everything in his power to ensure that his son did not end up like him.

When Nathan's eyes had fallen on his father's casket, he murmured a half-hearted apology, knowing he had failed.

They both had.

Nathan had ended up in the same position, spending his nights in front of a blank page on a computer, the letters on the keyboard mocking him.

It was a terrible fate but he considered it to be a blessing.

For that only, he promise he would honour his father's memory by letting one lone tear travel across his closely shaved face and fall on his father's form.

"I know you were more earth than you were water." He whispered to the eternally sleeping figure. "I know that you chose to return to the ground because the idea of travelling in the dark blue waters seemed frightening to you who kept his feet on the ground." He was reciting a part from the first book his father had written, the one Nathan had turned into his personal Bible.

"You weren't a great man, I'll be the first to admit it but you, also, weren't a bad man, so that evens the scale a bit, don't you think?" He laughed a bit, the sound rich and equally dark, as he took a long swing of the Vodka that he had secretly poured inside of a water-glass. "Honestly, old man, you were a complete asshole, especially when you were writing but I understand it now." It took him three more swings of his drink for the glass to be empty again and even then, he didn't stop talking.

"I know how it all suffocated you. A wife, a child, a job you hated. There was fire in your veins and it couldn't be extinguished, no matter how hard mom tried, I know." The alcohol was starting to get under his skin, creating an unwelcoming buzz; He couldn't write well when he was intoxicated, the words lacked depth and emotional involvement. "And, God, she tried her best." He snorted and some of the fellow mourners turned to stare at him more openly than when he had shown up to the church thirty minutes late with a disheveled appearance that hinted at the fact that his tardiness had not been a side effect of his tendencies to over sleep.