The Kind Worth Killing

by Peter Swanson

“Truthfully, I don’t think murder is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be. Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended? And your wife, for example, seems like the kind worth killing.”

There once was a husband named Ted, Who met his end in a volley of lead. It was clear he was rich— And his wife was a bitch— So it’s not a surprise that he’s dead.

We understood that survival was everything. It was the meaning of life. And to take another life was, in many ways, the greatest expression of what it meant to be alive.

I would continue to survive, knowing, as I’d known that night in the meadow, the stars pouring their light down on me, that I was special, that I was born with a different kind of morality. The morality of an animal—of a crow or a fox or an owl—and not of a normal human being.

At the top of the stone was a winged skull, a banner around it that said BE MINDFUL OF DEATH.