The Disease-Eater

by Sarah Busching

“I want someone to take his place,” I said. 

I’d expected the witch to raise an eyebrow or to demand why I thought my father was more deserving than anyone else. But she only asked, “Do you have a replacement in mind?”

“Several,” I said. “I can tell you who they are. Do you decide what’s easiest?” 

“Closest is easiest,” she said. “Whoever I can get to the fastest. So I can get rid of it.” 

The witch was a disease-eater. I’d found her through the acquaintance of a friend of a friend. The disease-eater went by no name and could be found only by her address and word of mouth, which had made finding her time-consuming but was also somehow reassuring. We met in her small office, which was sandwiched between a dentist and a lawyer. There was no plaque on her door, and the layout made me think she’d taken the place fully furnished after a therapist left. Her clear quartz jewelry clanked when she gestured with her hands.

Our verbal contract stated that she would eat the tumors and lesions out of my father’s liver, lymph nodes, and lungs and then expel them into the body of a replacement. I’d already assembled a mental list of substitutes for my dad, and now I compared their worst qualities against the time it would take to travel to them. 

There were billionaires and dictators and CEOs and, you know, pedophiles and rapists who deserved stage four liver cancer far more than the average person who contracted it, of course, but the recipient for my dad’s disease had to be personally connected to me, as well as someone to whom the disease-eater could easily gain physical access. 

There was my brother-in-law’s father, who had repeatedly spanked my toddler nephew and niece until my sister found out what was going on. But he was three states away. Or there was the priest who’d asked me, a teenager at the time, repeatedly if I was “actually sorry” during my confession (which included detailing my premarital sexual interactions) before he’d give me my penance and absolution. I’d already tracked down his parish, only an hour drive from here. And then there was my cousin’s wife, old enough that she’d been more like my aunt, who’d repeatedly told me I was fat when I was a kid and who’d give me half-portions of dessert after serving my siblings and her own kids full slices of birthday cake. She lived ten minutes away from my parents. 

There were others I could have named without hesitation. Irrational anger and “why us” will do that. But like the witch, I wanted this done as quickly as possible. 

“My cousin’s wife. Christine Dobson.” Her kids only came home for the holidays because she paid for their airfare. They’d had to obtain their childhood vaccines after they turned eighteen. I didn’t really think anybody was going to miss her that much. I pulled up one of her social media profiles and held out my phone to the disease-eater.

“What’s the address?”

I told her.

“All right.”

“So she’s… acceptable? To replace my Dad?” 

“Sure,” she said. “As long as you pay seventy-five percent up front.”

Cash, of course. The full payment was going to clear out more than half my savings. It was worth it. Dad was still in his sixties. He’d only retired last year. “I have it now,” I said.

“Excellent.”

Before today, I’d considered myself a good person. I’d never committed a crime or said anything racist or homophobic. I donated to bail funds and abortion funds and, to cover my bases, to my parish when I showed up to church at Christmas every other year or so. I always volunteered at our biannual charitable team-building events at work. 

And after the meeting, I still didn’t think choosing disease transference made me a bad person. Anyone else would do the same thing, if they had the money. Even if they didn’t think they could wish terminal cancer on their worst enemy, they’d do it if one of the people they loved most in the world was a victim. I was a good person. I was. I always had been.

We planned for the witch to meet me at my dad’s chemo treatment the next day. I was going to drive and sit with him for the four hours that the infusion took. He was going to get a private room—because I’d already bribed a nurse—and I knew he’d fall asleep. 

This was his third session of palliative chemo. My mom had taken him to the first two treatments. In the car, he and I talked about anything except where we were going. 

“You didn’t have to take off work, you know,” he said. “Your mother is retired.”

“Yeah, well. I have a ton of sick leave to use up. It doesn’t roll over.” 

“Anything exciting going on over there?” 

“No. Well, yeah. A place with açaí bowls opened up downstairs.” 

“That’s like ice cream but you pretend it’s healthy?” 

“Yup. Except I get the one with chocolate syrup and chocolate cookies crumbled on top. Although it has banana and peanut butter, so I can call it lunch.”

He snorted.

We were most of the way through his treatment before he fell asleep and I texted the disease-eater. She responded that she was in the parking garage and would be up in a few minutes.

I watched Dad’s face as he snored lightly. 

It had taken three phone calls from my mom to first lose hope and then to—not regain it, exactly, but to develop an unhinged inability to accept reality. The only reason I was sane again was because I was one of the few people who’d ever find a loophole in absurdity. 

I’d never forget Mom’s first phone call: “Dad’s doctor said he’s pretty sure the mass is malignant. They did a biopsy today and he’s going to have to do a CT scan next week. To find out how much there is.”

Sinking to the floor, unaware my legs were giving out. My body knew what was going on before my brain did; it anticipated what I wouldn’t know for certain for several days. Only able to say, “Okay,” over and over again.

And then the second call to find out the cancer wasn’t just in his liver, it had already spread to his lungs and his lymph nodes. And then the third phone call, when I had already given up hope but Mom was still talking about operation recovery times, when she finally had to give up that hope after nearly a week of hoping, and say the cancer was at this point inoperable.

Days and days of sudden, choking tears, the sudden inability to breathe. Looking up “how to stop crying” and pressing my tongue to the roof of my mouth or relaxing all my facial muscles because I was tired of my nose constantly running. 

Days of anger. Days of, “Why couldn’t it be … instead?” And then the relentless delusions and subsequent research that helped me discover that it could be.

In my father’s treatment room, I received a text from the disease-eater saying she was outside the door. I turned the handle as quietly as possible and she slipped in. 

She walked over to Dad’s chair, then looked back and glanced at me once. I saw the request for permission in her eyes, and I nodded my confirmation. She turned back to him and gently, so as not to disturb the chemo port, pulled his t-shirt up to reveal his stomach, where she placed a hand. After a moment, he lurched, like a loud noise had disturbed his sleep.

The disease-eater lifted a hand to her mouth and ate the disease. 

Without making even a small incision in his skin, she pulled her hand away and it was full of red tumors, jiggling like maggots as her hand moved. With much less grace than I’d expected from her elegant, compact form, she shoved the entire mass into her mouth at once and chewed, cheeks bulging, and audibly gulped the cancer down. She repeated this again and again. I threw up when she consumed the third handful and had to stop observing.

“I’m finished,” she said after several minutes. I turned around and she’d already pulled Dad’s shirt back down. She washed her hands in the sink.

I stared at him. He didn’t look any different. Then again, there had been very little noticeable difference between the time we assumed the cancer had started growing and his diagnosis. His next CT scan would be the only way we could tell.

“One more hour until the treatment is finished. Then he gets hooked up to the portable pump and I’ll drive him home,” I whispered.

“You know where to find me. Come quickly, or I’ll find you,” she said.

Once Dad was seated on his couch at home with a dose of anti-nausea meds, some room-temperature snacks, and the remote, I left him with Mom and told her I had to get back to work.

Less than an hour later, I’d picked up the disease-eater and parked in front of Christine’s house. Over the past day, I’d devised ways we could get her alone if my cousin were there. I couldn’t tell if anyone was home, since they had a garage and the door was shut, but it turned out it didn’t matter. 

I unbuckled, but the disease-eater did not. “Interesting,” she said. “I assume you didn’t know.”

“Know what?” I asked.

“That Christine is a witch.”

“What?” I shrieked.

“There are protection spells all over the house and the yard,” she said. 

“That means she’s a witch? She couldn’t have—I mean, like me, bought services, um—and, um, found a witch to put the spells there?”

The disease-eater shook her head. “No. Then there’d just be one spell, or maybe a couple charms and maybe an amulet thrown in. But this is a series of complicated spells that require regular maintenance. She’s a witch, or, maybe your cousin is. But it feels like her to me.”

“Holy shit,” I said. It was a good thing I’d never talked back to her as a kid, and that I’d mostly ignored her as an adult, I realized.

“Well, quickly, who’s next on your list?”

For a moment, I was still too surprised to say anything, and I forgot the other replacement options. “Father James Martin,” I finally replied, and showed the disease-eater his profile on his current parish’s website. He looked about ten years older than my dad.

“A priest?” She laughed. “Believe it or not, that would be a first for me.” 

“I do find that hard to believe, actually.” 

“Even non-believers have their superstitions.” 

“Do you?” I asked her. 

She raised an eyebrow.

“Right,” I said. “So are you okay with going? It’s an hour away.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Drive as fast as you can. I’m already experiencing discomfort.”

I pushed us up to ten over the speed limit. “Can you check and see if there’s a Mass schedule online?” I asked her. “It’s a weekday afternoon, but you never know. I assume they only have a morning Mass today, but he could be doing confession…”

After a few minutes, she said, “Nothing this afternoon. Just the morning Mass. Long over.”

“Good,” I said. Then I hesitated. “I don’t actually know if priests hang around the church or the office all day.”

“You’ll need to figure out how to get close to him immediately,” she said.

Her words made me uncomfortably aware of how close and contained we were in the car. Here I was, a perfectly serviceable receptacle for those maggoty tumors. The priest had better be there. “How come it has to be another person, anyway?” I asked. “Wouldn’t a cow or… a monkey work? Not that I have easy access to either.”

She smiled. “That’s a good question. In many cultures around the world, practitioners of folk magic tried, or still try, to transfer diseases or evil spirits to animals or plants. A stone, a leaf, a talisman. Birds and small beasts. I believe it does work sometimes. But for a transference of the magnitude I perform, as far as my abilities allow, the disease must go to a being of roughly similar proportions.” 

“I did read about stuff like that,” I admitted.

“It’s funny that we’re going to use a priest,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve also heard of sin-eaters?” 

I’d only known about disease-eaters for a few weeks. I shook my head.

“Well, you could argue that Jesus was the most famous sin-eater of them all. Dying for our sins, take my body as your bread. Certainly if it’s true, it makes sense. Taking on that much corruption and then not redistributing it. Sloppy.” 

I laughed. “We’re almost there,” I said after a while. I glanced over at her. She was staring at me, which I hadn’t realized until then. “What does it feel like?”

“Like nothing. Like death.” She gave me a smile, which, though my eyes were on the road and I could only see it in my peripheral vision, made me recoil. “It burns while it’s inside me, but there’s such a rush when I expel it again.” 

I went fifteen over the limit. Her hand fluttered over the console between us, as if she were about to grasp the gear shift, and I jerked towards my door. She rested her hand on the console lid. She didn’t stop staring at me until we were at the parish office’s parking lot. 

At the door, I pressed the buzzer and smiled through the glass door at the secretary’s desk. A white poof of hair swung in our direction, and the lock clicked open. The disease-eater followed me so closely she bumped into my back.

The office was quiet—muffled, really, with carpet, limited space, a small crucifix, and glossy artwork of Mary and various saints, most of whom I recognized: Saint Peter, Saint Agatha, Saint Elmo. 

“Good afternoon!” I sang out, much too loudly.

The woman at the desk wore a lime cardigan over a thick white cotton shirt. She gave me a thin smile. “Can I help you?”

“I’d like to see Father Martin, please.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

She didn’t even look at her screen or a calendar before saying, “He’s in meetings all day. If you could tell me what this is for, I could try to help you schedule something.”

Panic quickened my pulse, and I started to sweat. I could feel the witch’s gaze on me, tangible as a leech. If I couldn’t find a recipient for the illness burning inside her, she would.

“It’s an emergency,” I whispered. “I’m pregnant.”

The admin’s gaze went to my wedding ring. Between that and knowing I didn’t look young enough for pregnancy to be an emergency, I whispered again, saying, “It’s not his.”

She frowned. “Let me see if we can fit you in.” She disappeared into a hallway for a while, and when she returned she said, “He can see you for a couple of minutes in between meetings.” Her tone made it clear we weren’t to say anything else.

The disease-eater and I sat on two hard plastic chairs for forty-five minutes before the admin ushered us into an empty office to wait for Father Martin. There was no window, thankfully. The space was cramped with an overflowing bookshelf and three chairs for guests in front of the desk, which had flyers for an upcoming spaghetti dinner and a weeks-past casino night. When we were left alone, I pushed my chair away slightly from the witch’s.

“Nervous?” she asked.

“Maybe,” I admitted. But I could tell she knew the real reason for my feelings—she’d had the cancer inside her for hours now. My time was running out.

“Good afternoon,” Father Martin said as he entered the office. 

“Hi, Father,” I said. “Thank you for seeing us.”

“I heard we had an emergency?” he asked, shutting the door quietly and then taking his seat behind the desk.

His eyes crinkled behind his glasses. I was still nervous, but no other emotion struck me as I looked up at him. Weeks ago, when I’d looked up the survival rates for liver cancer, a cruel certainty had taken root in me.

I thought of my dad, shrinking into his chair at the infusion appointment. Of his hair loss. Of him driving me to lacrosse practice, watching my games, reading the newspaper when I wasn’t on the field. Grilling steaks and salmon at family parties, even his own birthdays. Laughing as he played home videos off a tape recorder, the whole camera hooked up to the television.

And then there was this priest, who’d asked me, “Are you sure you’re really sorry for that?” and “Are you certain you’ve confessed all your sins?” Like he needed more details. Like he wanted them. 

The truth was, it didn’t matter what this man had said to me. I would have picked anyone at this point. The neighbors who blasted their video games at three a.m. on weeknights. The customer service rep at the phone number for my dishwasher’s warranty who purposely dropped our call three times in a row when I tried to schedule a repair. The woman who ran a red in front of me on the drive to this parish. 

I glanced over at the disease-eater, and she nodded. She’d given me a basic outline. I wiped my hands on the knees of my pants.

Unlike my dad, Martin was conscious, so that had to be taken care of first. The disease-eater said, “Thank you for meeting with us, Father,” and half-stood from her chair, leaning over the desk. She covered his hand with hers, as if she were comforting him, but when he hissed and tried to pull away, she used both her hands to hold on for a few seconds more. Then she sat back in her chair, her hand now open to reveal a small plastic syringe.

“What…” he started, and then froze, quite literally. He stopped talking, slumped forward, and didn’t move again, not even to blink, although he was still breathing. 

I was almost disappointed there wasn’t more violence involved. For weeks, part of me had wanted an excuse to pound my fist into someone’s face. 

“Lock the door,” the witch whispered.

I moved quickly, and when I turned around, she had the priest pushed backwards in his chair. I didn’t know if she’d poisoned him with mundane drugs or used a magical potion. She’d only told me that she had an easy way of ensuring compliance from the substitute. I knew why she hadn’t explained: she could have taken me by surprise, too.

Compared to the cancer expulsion, the cancer extraction had been peaceful, a gentle, surgical procedure. Dad’s body had wanted the illness gone, and this was an uninfected body absorbing months of cell growth all at once. A reverse exorcism.

The witch dug her fingers into Martin’s mouth and forced his jaw open. Then she leaned over and covered his lips with hers, her mouth widening further than was natural. My stomach twisted, and I was grateful I hadn’t eaten anything since puking earlier today.

Speaking of regurgitation. I couldn’t see exactly how the implantation worked, because the witch had sealed her lips over Martin’s, but their bodies shook as though there were a minor earthquake behind the desk. Lumpy rivers rushed up under the skin of her throat and were mirrored in his, where they writhed down, bulging his neck and stretching his Adam’s apple. A low, constant roar heaved from her as she expelled the tumors. Intermittent whimpers escaped him as he received them.

She held him in place with two hands on his chest, and when it was over, she pushed herself off to stand. A little black smoke trailed from her face. When she closed her mouth, her jaw shrank back to its normal size. Gently, she closed Martin’s mouth and eyes.

“He isn’t dead, is he?” I whispered.

“No. He’s still conscious, although he’ll fall asleep in a minute or two,” she replied. “We can leave him like this.”

“He won’t remember?”

“What I gave him will scramble his memory, too. He’ll be very groggy, think it was all a nightmare.”

“What you gave him? In the syringe?”

She nodded. “We can go,” she said. “Just tell that woman he dozed off.”

If Martin falling asleep during a meeting seemed odd to the admin, she didn’t mention it. I drove the witch back to her office with very little conversation, just playing the news. 

She didn’t get out of the car immediately, instead smiling over at me. 

Worried she’d missed spewing out some part of the cancer that she’d now feed to me, I said, “What?”

“Oh, it’s just that usually my customers have parting words. They need me to say something to give them closure.”

“Like what?”

“They want to know if it’s going to work, for one. And they’re usually starting to feel something other than relief by this point. They want to know if they did the right thing.” She raised her eyebrows expectantly. 

I rolled my eyes. “There was no right thing. Only what was right for us.”

She shrugged. “Pay me the last twenty-five percent once you get your proof.”

“Of course. I’ll let you know.”

I set up news alerts for Father James Martin. Sure enough, six months later his obituary appeared online. No surviving family other than an elderly brother and a niece who lived in another country. A new priest would replace him soon. I waited for regret or guilt and was relieved to find it never came.

Dad’s oncologist proclaimed that the chemo had sent the cancer into complete remission, that he’d never seen anything like it, that Dad was in the one percent of survivors. “Bizarre,” Dad kept saying. “Really bizarre.” Then he’d leave the room to cry.

At his next birthday dinner, Christine cornered me by the powder room. “What a miracle,” she said in a low voice.

I tried to sidestep her. “Yes,” I said. “A miracle.”

She gazed at me. “Don’t get too comfortable with miracles.”

I sent the disease-eater a small gift basket with gourmet fruit and chocolates, along with the second payment. As I confirmed the wire transfer, I couldn’t stop smiling. My daily bursts of tears turned into random laughter. I imagined Dad watching my nephew and niece, and maybe even my own kids someday, graduate high school. Grilling burgers for their birthdays. 

The disease-eater refused to work with the same client twice, even for a simple protection spell, but Christine would occasionally mention how the parish had never been the same since Father Martin had died. I knew she didn’t attend Mass at that parish.

But even so. I was content. I was happy.

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Sarah Busching received a Bachelor of Arts in English from the College of William and Mary. She also received a Master of Business Administration from George Mason University’s School of Management. She lives in Richmond, VA. View her work at sarahbusching.com.