Empathy for the devil in Dead Snakes

Empathy for the devil in Dead Snakes
Published July 2015

Empathy for the devil 
by Alison Ross

There is sympathy and there is empathy and then there is the hole inside my head. The devil told me he'd take a look at it, but he doesn't do house calls and anyway, my kitchen is a mess. So I rang the doctor instead, and he prescribed a large dose of apathy, and plenty of restless sleep. When the devil called asking me to a dinner party at midnight in the garden of pseudo-evil, I yawned and fell back into my Baudelaire nightmare, where the flowers smell like narcissism and the wine tastes like the aftermath of excessive calculation. 

And besides, I never really liked solving equations, which is maybe why I have this hole inside my head.