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Murdoc Niccals did not cry.
He did not cry when he sliced his big toe open at the age of seven on a broken beer bottle in the living room, nor did he cry when that wound failed to heal properly and almost resulted in the loss of his foot from a particularly aggressive infection. He did not cry when his older brother Hannibal- at the time fifteen, sporting an old ratty leather jacket and a new penchant for spending long periods of time in his room with strange girls- had killed the stray cat outside Murdoc’s window in a haphazard attempt to impress the lady friend of the week. He did not cry when he’d taken his first ever puff of a cigarette and coughed till he vomited up the meager remains of whatever he’d scrounged up for yesterday’s dinner. (These tears, he reasoned, were simply his body’s natural reaction to throwing up, and therefore did not count.) If he thought hard about it, he reckoned he could pinpoint the last time he’d allowed himself to take part in the forbidden activity, allowed the big, fat droplets of liquid sorrow to drip down his chin and cut through the grime of his flushed cheeks. But it was not an event he cared to remember. He sometimes wondered if he had flat out gone the Discovery Channel route and evolved past the ability to cry- an adaptation he had no use or want for. The well had run dry.
So why then, in the name of sweet Satan, were the backs of his eyes prickling with the threat of wetness?
He chanced another glance down at the paper in his hand. It was thicker than an envelope, some of that fancy business card shite, and crumpled through the middle from the increasing tightness of his fist. Thin swirls of calligraphy quietly adorned the off-white, injected with enough polite sympathy to create the illusion that the creator knew him personally, truly understood the pain and complexity of the situation. Murdoc chuckled ruefully. Some miserable old funeral director across the goddamn ocean didn’t give a shit about him. Hell, the man had half a mind to hop on a flight to exactly-wherever-the-fuck the gentleman presided and give him a cordial lesson over the real meaning of pain, the little-
The first drop fell before he could register. With a little ‘pat’ against the thick parchment, the tear landed, almost imperceptibly blurring a loop of cursive directly in the middle. Murdoc stared as though he had encountered an alien. Tentatively, with quiet skepticism, he dragged the pad of his thumb across the surface of the funeral program, where the offending party had spread its wetness. This movement smeared the word in the middle even more. Like some wounded animal, he recoiled, and the paper fluttered to the floor next to the heel of his boot.
But the ink, just the impossibly small patch of pigment across his fingerprint, remained all the same. A sickening jolt of electricity hit Murdoc like a crack of lightening sent straight from the depths of hell.
Even from the grave, Sebastian Niccals had managed to leave his final bruise.
Sebastian Jacob Niccals
1941-2006
Born and passed with the spirit of Stoke-On- Trent
May God bring peace in this time of turmoil
Rest In Peace