I am, needless to say, a creature of marvelous ugliness. The front of my body from the top of my head to those precious parts between my legs had been seared so badly in the fire into which I had fallen — and where Pappy Gatmuss had left me to burn for a minute or two while he slapped my mother around — that my reptilian appearance had become a mass of keloid tissue, shiny and seared. My face was — still is — a chaos of bubbles, little hard red domes of flesh where I'd fried in my own fat. My eyes are two holes, without lashes or brows. So is my nose. All of them, eyeholes and nostrils, constantly run with grey-green mucus so that there isn't a moment, day or night, when I don't have rivulets of foul fluids running down my cheeks.

As to my mouth — of all my features, I wish I could possess my mouth again, just as it had been before the fire. I had my mother's lips, generous below and above, and what kissing I had practiced, mainly on my hand or on a lonely pig, had convinced me that my lips would be the source of my good fortune. I would kiss with them, and lie with them; I would make victims and willing slaves of anyone my eyes desired, simply by talking a little, and following the talk with kisses, and the kisses with demands. And they'd melt into compliance, every one of them, happy to perform the most demeaning acts as long as I was there to reward them with a long, tongue-tied kiss when they were done.

But the fire didn't spare my lips. It took them too, erasing them utterly. My mouth is now just a slot that I can barely open an inch because the scarred flesh around it is too solid.

Is it any wonder that I'm tired of my life? That I want it erased by fire? You'd want the same thing. So, in the name of empathy, burn this book. Do it for compassion's sake, if you have the heart, or because you share my anger. There's no saving me. I'm a lost cause, trapped forever between the covers of this book. So finish me.