Tony Vacation

“For all their laughter, ghouls are a dull lot. Hunger is the fire in which they burn, and it burns hotter than the hunger for power over men or for knowledge of the gods in a crazed mortal. It vaporizes delicacy and leaves behind only a slag of anger and lust. They see their fellows as impediments to feeding, to be mauled and shrieked at when the mourners go home. They are seldom alone, not through love of one another’s company, but because a lone ghoul is suspected of concealing food. Their copulation is so hasty that distinctions of sex and identity are often ignored.

Just as she had once yearned to know the secrets of the grave, Meryphillia now longed to penetrate the mysteries of friendship and love. Mostly she wanted to know about love. She believed that it must transcend her bony collisions with Arthrax, least unfeeling of all the male ghouls, whom she untypically clove to.

'Why are you crying?' he once asked while their coupling rattled the slats of a newly emptied coffin.

'It’s nothing. Dust in my eyes.'

'That happens.'

His question and comment were the nearest a ghoul could come to sympathy, but it fell so far short of the standard she imagined to be human that she wept all the more. --"Meryphillia”
― Brian McNaughton, The Throne of Bones