Only Child

By Jackie Myre

"Without mess there is no life."

David did not fit in at school. He saw and drew patterns that no-one seemed to understand. He asked awkward questions which got him into trouble. But David had loving and supportive parents, a cosmic purpose on a post-mortal plane and an inner self named Triana.

Told from the point of view of Triana's father, Only Child is a stand alone novella expanding the universe of the Mortal Masquerade series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jackie Myre
• Release date: Jul 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005076689

Jackie Myre

Habitually weird, cheerily dark and proudly genderfluid (male at birth), the pseudonymous Jackie Myre followed an early obsession with cartoonishly bizarre perils into experiments in stage magic, escapology and messy performance art, usually appearing in drag. When middle aged adulthood caught up, Jackie began transferring his experiences in both online fantasy and the Northern UK goth and fetish scene into the Mortal Masquerade series of novels and novellas.Jackie is married with many cats in central England.

Book preview

Only Child

by Jackie Myre

Copyright © 2020 Jackie Myre All rights reserved

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Chapter 1: I Think She's Me

Various people have called us liberal, progressive or modern parents, as if it were an insult. I'll accept unconventional.

We never married, but then neither do a lot of couples these days, either on principle or because they never got around to it (in our case it was a bit of both). We supported our child when the powers that be were more interested in deciding which particular category of problem to file her under. When she found her true self under a different gender we dedicated ourselves to seeing her fulfilled and adjusted our work lives accordingly. And we never stopped being there for her, even after we died.

Steph and I met in our early twenties when we both began working at the same bank after university. We shared similar tastes in music and started going to festivals together, confessed our love and eventually had David.

David was always different. He loved to draw, but less in the usual Mummy and Daddy's House style, more in intricate, abstract patterns that most people dismissed as a mess but which seemed to make sense to him. If you asked him he would give quite eloquent answers about what he'd drawn, if you squinted you might even see recognisable images. But it worried Steph's Mum, who just wished David would paint zoo animals like a normal child.

When David started school he was enthusiastic about the idea, but his relationship with formal education was all downhill from there. He never mixed well with the other children and gained a reputation as a troublemaker for asking too many of the wrong questions in class. He became increasingly withdrawn, refused to engage with lessons he didn't see the purpose of and began carrying around heavy reading books which he would sink himself into at frequent intervals. When the books were confiscated, he'd draw in his exercise books instead. He was academically capable in spite of all this - his grades in Maths, History and RE were top notch, to the annoyance of the teachers who daily struggled to get him onside in other subjects. If David was interested in learning a subject he would, but it had to be on his own terms.

When he got into trouble, he became very upset. He would complain loudly about how he had just tried to follow the rules and refused to accept consequences, escalating the conflict. When he calmed down, he'd sink into depression, telling us he never wanted to upset people, that he tried to take himself out of situations and treat people calmly but they would just pursue him and force him to be someone he didn't like. It was around this time that the image of Triana began appearing in the pages of his exercise books, first in drawings, then in pages and pages of neatly written diary entries in the first person.

I think she's me, he told us, in a calm moment.

Triana remained a concept for just under a year, until David was home sick one day and we returned from work to find him wearing one of Steph's dresses and a pair of leggings, calmly watching TV and looking happier than we had ever seen him. He spoke softly with a calm confidence he had never had previously, when Steph asked if we were speaking to Triana he - or rather, she - confirmed that we were.

We told David that Triana was welcome to come out anytime she wanted and even bought him some girls' clothes in the right size so he could play dress up. We thought maybe it was a phase, a coping mechanism we could entertain for a while, but that was the last we saw of David. From then on he became Triana full time and it was like watching a caterpillar emerge as a butterfly. Triana was confident and happy in a way David never was. The anger and frustration was gone and conversation came much more easily. So now we had a daughter, one that we'd had all along without knowing.

When the time came to go back to school she wanted to go as Triana in girl's uniform, but the school would have none of it, insisting that she attend as a boy, as David. The very thought sent her into despair and we had no confidence in the school at that point anyway, sending David back would just be undoing all the progress he'd made as Triana. So Steph and I made the decision to homeschool Triana and moved to part time work schedules so one of us would always be home to teach her. By this point we'd saved enough money to soften the hit in income and had investments we could continue to trade on the side.

Triana loved the idea. Even though she was homeschooling on her own she wanted to have a uniform to wear - she said getting dressed for school helped give the day structure, so we let her design her own school uniform which we put together from standard items. Having designed her own basic uniform, she collected variations on the same theme and changed the colours from time to time, but she always wore school clothes for studying and got changed into casual clothes as soon as the working day was over. It was important to her to maintain some kind of consistency in her day to day activities.

As it turned out, Triana taught us as much as we taught her, we learned together. She shot through the books we bought and aced the online tests, as she progressed beyond what we could teach her we hired some private tutors to help us out. She started a blog to record her studies and joined a message board to communicate with other homeschooled children, where she found a community of friends neither David nor Triana had ever had before. They swapped ideas, did projects together and chatted socially, which was helpful both for her and us as we got to communicate with other parents in similar situations.

Triana had a fascination with science, religion and philosophy. She didn't want to go to church or take up a religion, but she did want to know about them, to understand different viewpoints.