She was dead.  If anyone could epitomise and symbolise a place, it was this corpse.   It was hilarious in a way, absurd.  I used to pretend that I just found the idea of death hilarious.  That was a gargantuan lie.  My head denied the truth but my heart always knew – it was always there reminding of my hidden defects.  I admit it when I saw her in this state, I laughed.  My manifold hatred of everything pure won through at last.  After the long struggle my hatred boiled through, I admitted defeat and just accepted that I was not a pleasant character but I don’t feel guilty about it.

Why should I?  Feelings of guilt and remorse are not tolerable to me; my conscience is just made this way – although what is conscience without morality?  Pointless question isn’t it, for one such as me?  Morality is something my head understands but my heart has never understood or more appropriately ‘felt’.  Dark thoughts, amoral thoughts are palpably comfortable and amusing.  I get pleasure from them, primal to the extreme.  It is erotic, heady heights, an orgasm of death.  I will not feel guilt; I cannot disconnect this perpetual pleasant dark, anymore than you can amputate your own limbs. 

I have another confession to make, many years ago my grandfather died, he was a cruel man beyond the reprieve of God, the Devil no doubt took him.  Far more interesting company I would have thought.  Belt buckles and wooden canes were his particular purview, especially against his own kin.  Nothing delighted him more than the metallic smell of a bloody wound deliciously opened, on the backs of his sons.  On the day of his funeral. I remember the priest in his ceremonial finery.  I was 15 years old at the time.  This was the day I discovered the hypocrisy of men and the even greater hypocrisy of our great Gods.  The priest sent my grandfather off with the finest ceremony he could deliver.  The instant the priest had stopped. I laughed.  Not a nervous laugh as my mother would have you believe, a genuine laugh of pleasure.  I laughed at his cruelty, his supposed salvation and God’s hypocrisy in trying to redeem his soul.  Although not a Christian idea, I have often wondered if part of my grandfather had been reborn in me.  My grandfather would have laughed as I did and in a way, I thought I had his memory to live up to and in no way was I going to disappoint him.