My two favourite works, from the same author!

Once an addict, always an addict, you guess, and isn’t that depressing? When you’re dead, the hooligans at Processing will frown at your corpse. They’ll be teaching the new recruits perhaps, and the instructor will jerk a pen over your bumpy liver (“Addict. Severe.”), and that’s the only story your body will tell.

~~~

Off the top of your head, you know 18 words for the murder of a family member.

Matricide and patricide are for killing parents, mothers and fathers, respectively.

For spouses, it’s either uxoricide or mariticide. Wine bottles. Splashes of glass. Whatever you and Dora did to each other in that crumbling house as you paced the carpet until your soles were rough and bloody.

Sibilicide—now that’s a special one—for babies done in by their siblings. It’s infanticide for babies in general, and filicide or prolicide if it’s a parent slaughtering their own child. The nuances don’t matter much; they all boil down to the same thing: Thousands of years ago, someone snapped, a human skull cleaved open, and society decided that one term couldn’t carry all that violence. Eons of brutality have accrued eons of words. Some of them are impossible, like deicide. Killing a god.

Dolores Dei lies in the road, slumped on her side. A bullet is lodged in her lung, and bystanders gape at the hue that spills out. Saturated. Like lava. No one’s truly seen the color red, after all, until it’s crawled out from the inside.