Extract from an Email to My Heirs
by johannespunkt
but not flashy. Something that grabs attention without tricks. Something actually imposing. And when I die I want you to sell me out. I have cultivated a scandalous existence and each of you have your own key to the puzzle. The puzzle pieces won’t fit, of course, all of this will be carefully thought out. Everyone will get to believe what they want to believe, but I want you to profit off those beliefs. You’re all fighting to keep my image true to life, you all have your own nefarious agendas. Agendae? Perhaps one of you will leak this email and one or two of the others will question its legitimacy. You need to keep that up. There will already be a trove of scandals piling up, things I’ve been keeping out of the papers. Things I’ve let into the papers because someone sympathetic to me wrote it, misguidedly. There are people I’ve been paying off; you all know who they are. Collectively, at least, you can scrounge up a list. Stop paying half of them. Let them squirm. And I want you to hold more than one funeral. Can you do that? All of them closed-casket, don’t let any outsider know the real date you put me in the ground. Let my secrets spill out, let me live in the collective imagination. Spread rumours that I faked my death. Refute those rumours. Anything. As for the suit,