Published 'Zine Zone' 1997

I'm sure you'll want to hear from me about certain events - events that probably affected you more than me - even if my word is easy to doubt following those lies I once told you, all those years ago, about loving you. Or is it that I think you need my side of the story before you get your own - if that were indeed feasible? Yet words seem to confuse issues. What we need are more smiles and kisses. But here goes with words.

Like myself, you no doubt tend to believe the latest pack-of-convincing-lies ... a belief which, in many ways, is like life itself. A mood is ever the current one, isn't it? And death the final certainty. Indeed our happiness at that time, short-lived as it was, did not entail, by necessity, eventual unhappiness.

I may not even send this letter but if I do, you may put it at the back of your mind where forgotten memories flourish. You see, I haven't lost my touch for words, however clumsy the words themselves are. Yet it is perhaps my words against yours, as it were, but can you believe either of us? You'll even doubt I'm writing this letter at all, despite my signature at its end. Is that the case? If so, it would have to be from someone else pretending it's written by me? I'd have to get the body of it word-processed from this rough draft to carry off that little ruse, there being no hope of forging my handwriting for such a length. Simply the end signature will take eternities to get the tails and loops just right, in any event.

No, you've no real confidence in being able to comprehend this letter? But you'll have to believe what seems natural by the time you've finished scouring its contents .All I ask is that you simply reserve judgment till the very end, when you can compare the signature to that appended to the previous missives I sent you - all those lovey-dovey ones with pierced hearts from the hey-day of our happiness. I expect your signature is a template of your unsullieable soul.

Anyway, do you really want me to nanny you in this way? I recall us exploring your mother's wardrobe, to see if we could find evidence of your father's strange hobby.  The smell of mothballs, the deeper-than-usual coat pockets, the dark dresses – all were signs of something like forgotten memories: signs in the end, of nothing. What we were really intent on finding, you and I, were your father's tie pins and cuff links, his wire rings and prongs - not to speak of his surgical umbrellas, steel enemas and iron mouth-stretchers. The stigmata represented his signature, didn't they? Every tail and loop in place and recognisable – even when we came to identify the stigmatised body itself, one gloomy autumn afternoon, in the bright mortuary.

"Did your father have plastic surgery?" was the official's first question, point blankly ignoring your evident distress and wondering how such a tall corpse could have fathered somebody as short as you.

"Plastic? No it wasn't - plastic," you answered, without really thinking, your eyes still locked upon the corpse who'd once given birth to you. The body's eyes were coppered. Nose bent out of joint by the fatal accident, without breaking it, incredible as it may seem.

But this was all subterfuge, as it turned out. Your mother's wardrobe of clothes, ranked like starved orphans, strung like faceless body-puppets, was the very clue we had missed. With your father dead, we could now concentrate on factors that had been too obvious not to miss. Your mother was indeed party to your father's tricks. Their marriage actually hung on mutilation. Why the rents, otherwise?

Yes, I lied when I told you it was me writing this letter. Death being the only certainty, I needed to unpick the wire stitches of alternate generations. Pirouettes and harlequinades, cyborg primadonnas, whatever, none were my idea of deja vu. Black-hearted beads and corrupt pearls fixed on spikes were more owner-friendly, however, than dolls that blindly hugged you to death. Smuts for eyes, blade-chains for alabaster necks, giving birth to metal meat-hooks was never fun.

Yes, you understood it even before you began - and, yes, without a sneaky look over the page - that there was no signature at the end. Nibs and quills, without fluid for words, you see, may only quicken a midget marionette's finger-joints. Each with a ring, echoing those rings piercing other parts. Guardians of the orifices, making my already thirsty womb dry as a bone. And my mood ever at the tail-end of hope, when I see there are no kisses as well as no signature.