Tribal-style Mickey Mouse face design

I meant to write the week after the reunion, but the hall smelled so strongly of floor polish that I came home with a headache and a raffle ticket I still can't account for. You were right, though. I did keep the stencil. It's been in the old shortbread tin under my bed since Harcourt Road, folded in quarters, the card gone soft as a tea towel.

You cut that face in the back room of Tolley's sign shop the August we were fifteen, with your dad's craft knife and the lamp angled so the shadows fell where you wanted them. I held the card flat and counted spirals out loud. You wouldn't let a single curl run into the next, not in the ears, not in the mouth. Mr Tolley said nobody would pay for fancy work on a seaside board, and he was proved wrong only once, when the Pier Arcade ordered the grinning mouse for its shooting gallery and paid in cash he kept in his sock.

Last Thursday I took it out and held it against the kitchen window. The light came through only where the card had been cut away, so the thing I'd always thought was solid was mostly holes, the way most things turn out when you look at them long enough. Ears first, always, you'd said, because the eye needs somewhere to land. I'd forgotten that, or decided not to remember it.

I'm enclosing the stencil with this letter. Keep it or burn it, but please don't cut anything new into it, I know your hands. Tell me what the ears looked like on the day you finished them, because from here I can only see the holes.