The Vessel of Echoes

The first time I tasted someone’s sorrow, it wasn’t planned. It wasn’t even intentional. It just happened — like lightning striking the wrong tree.

It was during my uncle’s funeral, a muggy September afternoon in Atlanta. My cousin, Mina, stood beside the casket, clutching their father’s worn leather bracelet — a simple thing, frayed at the edges, but heavy with memory. Her eyes were red-rimmed, the kind of tired that no sleep could cure.

When she hugged me, her arms trembling, she pressed the bracelet into my palm.

“Take it,” Mina whispered, voice raw like gravel. “I can’t stand to look at it anymore.”

Not knowing what else to do, I shoved the bracelet into my pocket and left. Driving home, I expected grief to claw at me too. Instead, warmth crept through my stomach — like swallowing a shot of spiced rum in winter. By the time I pulled into my apartment complex, my chest felt strangely light. Calm. Almost… exhilarated.

Later that night, Mina called. For the first time in weeks, she’d slept through the night.

“It’s like something lifted off me,” she said.

I didn’t connect the dots until two weeks later, standing in the fluorescent glare of a gas station. I was biting into one of those neon-blue iced cupcakes that stain your teeth for hours. The bracelet was still in my pocket. Absently, I pulled it out. Blue icing smudged on the leather. I licked it off.

The bracelet dissolved on my tongue.

The sensation was sharp and vivid. A rush. Heat. Then clarity. And beneath that, Mina’s grief — not as weight pressing down, but as a strange echo within me. A whispering ache that wasn’t mine.

That’s when I understood. I hadn’t just taken her bracelet. I’d eaten her sorrow.

Five years later, that accident had become my career.

Not publicly, of course. You can’t exactly file taxes as a “Sorrow Swallower.” But word spread quietly: if you had grief too big to carry, you came to me. My name was Zachary Brooks — just Zack to most — but among those desperate few, I was something closer to legend.

The process was simple. Bring me something soaked in memory. An old hoodie. A wedding ring. A journal. I’d consume it, and the grief would leave you. I charged on a sliding scale: $1,000 for a parent’s grief, $500 for siblings, $250 for grandparents. Pets were a flat $100. Not because animals mattered less, but because their grief left fewer shadows inside me.

But here’s the thing: I never told my clients the whole story. Their grief didn’t just vanish. It lived inside me. I became a vault for seventy-eight lives — each leaving behind whispers, itches, half-formed thoughts. I called them the Echoes.

Most days, I could tune them out. Like a TV murmuring in another room. But over the past few months, they’d been getting louder. Murmurs turned into arguments. Arguments turned into pleas.

Let us out. Let us see them. We miss them.

I kept ignoring them. Kept feeding my addiction to that warm rush after eating someone’s pain. It was better than any high — smoother than pills, stronger than booze. But it came with a price I’d refused to see.

Growing up, I had one recurring nightmare: trapped in my body, eyes open but limbs frozen, watching as someone else controlled me. I’d wake up choking on air, drenched in sweat.

That fear followed me into adulthood. I never connected it to my work until the day everything broke.

It happened on a grey-skied Tuesday. The city smelled like rain and diesel fumes. A woman named Corinne brought me her brother’s leather jacket. He’d died three months prior — overdose. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat.

“Will it hurt?” she asked, knuckles pale against the jacket’s sleeve.

“Not you,” I said, pocketing the jacket.

After she left, I locked the door. Turned the music up loud. Sat at my kitchen table and pushed the jacket into my mouth.

The taste was sharp — leather and salt. Tears and loss. As it dissolved, a deeper warmth filled me. But then, something changed.

I heard a man’s voice. Clear. Close. Inside my skull.

“Finally.”

Before I could react, my hands slammed flat on the table. My legs locked. My breath hitched, but I wasn’t the one controlling it.

“You’ve been so selfish,” the voice continued. “Keeping us trapped.”

Panic roared through me. I tried to speak, but my lips wouldn’t move. I wasn’t driving anymore.

My nightmare had become real.

Other voices joined in — young, old, angry, sad.

“It’s our turn now.”

For the next six hours, I lived in hell. My body moved on its own. My fingers pulled out my client list. My mouth spoke in voices that weren’t mine, practicing how they sounded. The Echoes were learning how to use me.

I was still there — watching. Trapped behind my own eyes.

By the time control slipped back to me, I was on my kitchen floor, blood under my nails, my mouth tasting like metal. The clock said 4:00 a.m.

I wasn’t alone anymore.

Over the following days, the Echoes took me on joyrides. Visiting clients. Speaking with voices that matched long-dead relatives. Collecting grief-soaked objects. Feeding themselves.

Seven homes in three days. Each time, they made me watch.

“Tommy?” a woman whispered as I stood on her porch, my voice echoing her dead brother’s.

“It’s me,” my mouth said. “I’m back.”

I wanted to scream. Instead, I stood there like a puppet.

Each new object consumed made them stronger. My mind shrank into itself. By day four, I was allowed maybe ten minutes of control a day — like some pitiful favor.

That’s when I decided I had to end it.

They were planning something bigger. I overheard them talking through me, planning to visit cemeteries next. Fresh grief. Fresh victims.

I couldn’t let that happen. But how does a passenger seize the wheel?

I dug deep — into my own grief. Not the Echoes’ borrowed sorrow. My grief.

My father’s overdose. My mother’s quiet suicide. Friends lost to addiction. Love left behind.

I pulled it all up. Not to feed it to them — but to weaponize it.

Grief is alive. And unlike the Echoes, mine was real. Sharp. Endless.

When I unleashed it inside my mind, the Echoes screamed. They weren’t built to handle raw grief. They only knew the filtered kind. The echoes, not the source.

“You wanted sorrow?” I thought. “Here’s mine.”

I watched them shatter like glass under a hammer. Some voices vanished entirely. Others retreated, smaller and weaker.

For the first time in days, I stood up under my own power.

I stared at myself in the mirror: pale skin, red eyes, wild hair. But my eyes were my own again.

“This isn’t over,” one faint voice hissed. “We’ll wait.”

“No,” I said aloud.

I opened the medicine cabinet. Pulled out an old pocketknife — my grandfather’s. The one object I’d never consumed because it meant too much.

Now, it felt right.

I put the knife in my mouth.

It dissolved — but differently. It wasn’t just grief this time. There was love in it too. Pride. Memory. It balanced the sorrow.

That’s when I understood. I’d been doing it wrong all along.

Grief isn’t just pain. It’s love, unanchored. Homeless. If all you consume is the pain, you create nothing but hungry ghosts.

The next morning, I boxed up every grief-object in my apartment. Not to eat — but to return them. One by one.

Some people cursed me. Others cried. A few begged for me to take their pain again.

But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.

Each return lightened me. The voices quieted further. They became something closer to memory than possession.

A week after, a man brought me his daughter’s teddy bear. She’d died of cancer at seven.

“Can you take this?” he asked, shaking. “I can’t carry this anymore.”

Instead of swallowing his grief, I sat with him. For hours. Listening. Learning about his daughter.

Before he left, I gave him the bear back.

“Let it hurt,” I told him. “Let it remind you. Grief isn’t just pain. It’s love looking for a home.”

When he walked away, clutching the bear, I felt something shift inside me again. A little more silence. A little more peace.

I’m not sure what I am now. Not a grief eater. Maybe just a man who finally learned to live with his own Echoes.

And for the first time in my life, I sleep without nightmares.