“What if you’re already dead?”

What if this is heaven... or hell... and you’re already in the afterlife? You could be in cold storage and not even know it -- rotting in a pine box, worms crawling through your eye sockets.

As loved ones mourn your loss, or celebrate your demise, you may have already begun your ‘dead life,’ paired in purgatory with appointed strangers. Your friends, family, lover, spouse and even your pets could all be stand-ins (dead as doornails, like you) selected by the ‘higher beings’ at Deathmatch.con

Maybe your previous life was even worse than this? Can you imagine that? That’s why we experience deja vu’s -- it’s our previous incarnation coming back to haunt us. Or, perhaps we’re on our second or third lives -- or, in the case of Shirley Maclaine, our 135th life? Did you ever wonder why past lives are always so notable? The Earl of Rottingham, King Arthur, Jim Morrison, etc.  But odds are better that in your previous life you were a ditch-digger, streetwalker, tollbooth worker, or even a goat, cactus or cockroach.

So, instead of dreading death with each breath, you should inhale life and suck it up because you’re probably already toast. This explains Las Vegas -- which surely must be heaven and hell on earth (depending if you won at roulette). Remember, “Every time you hit a jackpot an angel gets its’ wings.”

Who am I? Who was I? And who am I going to be? These profound questions we all struggle with through our life and afterlife. It’s the same questions we face at Girls and Corpses Magazine as we evolve, grow and discover ourselves. Are we a comedy magazine? A horror magazine? A death-styles magazine? Or, merely a bony digit poised on the throbbing pulse of a gonzo generation fascinated with the bizarre and their own mortality.

Girls and Corpses Magazine shall not be forced into any preconceived package of what a magazine should be. We demand equal rights for all corpses! We want to be free to take risks and tackle sexy stories, scary stories and those of substance, such as in this issue’s cutters piece and our torture interview.

It is the contrasts between life and death, the beautiful and the repulsive, which continue to compel us at G&C. We know we have tapped your artery because you relentlessly email us, clutching this magazine in you sweaty palms like the Holy Grail... or the Gory Hail. From soldiers to schoolgirls to maximum-security inmates, we have struck an ominous chord with society.

For it is death and our inescapable mortality that brings us all together in this capriciously captivating coffin known as Girls and Corpses Magazine.

Rot on,

R.S. Rhine

“Corpsy”

©2008 (reprinted only with permission of author)