The morsel is always freshest on the ride home from the funeral. That is when the pain garners a sludgy quality, like bloody steak. Squelching and warm, just so, not hot, but warm. It is a beauty to feast, those tears like a salted white wine, the cheeks sunken inward. Perhaps I rendered that meat into something more…succulent. Something more divine. Though I know many would consider such a supposition perverse.

There is something different about you, there, in your black dress and your beautiful veil. The tears sparkle on your cheeks all the same, but when I taste of that divinity I find a sour reproach. Something brutal and compelling, something that drives me to hunger, but something that produces a warning bell, clear as clarion.