Peculiar Tales

by Ron Miller

  It was really scary for a while though I have to admit because it was dark and everyone was running around and there was lots of yelling and soon there were lots of loud bangs because the formen and the hands were shooting off their guns. The Bloods looked very scary because most of them have very white skin and they kind of looked like really big glow worms in the fire light. I think maybe the dark Bloods may have been even scarier because all I could see was their eyes and teeth kind so they looked kind of like ghosts or something. Lots of the Bloods were yelling things like Death! Death! or Kill! Kill! but I knew they must just be repeating what all the peopel must have been yelling because of course Bloods ca’nt think of things to say on their own because they are so dumb.

  As it turned out it was all the fault of one of the male Bloods who was a lot smarter than any of the others and always getting into mischive. It was really sad because he was such a good Blood always making more blood than almost any other in the herd and a really good breeder too but Father said that he had to be put down so Buster the foreman put him down.

  In the morning I helped clean up the big mess which was pretty awful. I found a sine that said DETH TU ALL VAMPS but Father told me it was just a bad joke and it had a bad word in it and he would fire the hand that made it and made me throw it on the fire so I did.

  Every one was helping clean up all the Bloods that got killed. I was’nt strong enough to use a pitch fork or shovel but Father let me use his electric saw which made me feel very proud. All the dead Bloods were drained first because Father could’nt afford to let the blood of so many hundreds of Bloods go to waste because that would have been totally wasteful. Then we put the parts in the big presser to get what was left. You ca’nt make peopel food out of this of course (unless you eat at Sam’s Shack ha ha! ) but the juices and ground-up parts make good feed for Bloods which is what we’ve always done with dead Bloods after they die so after all it was’nt such a bad thing after all.

  So the next time you have your daily blood at home or at the school cafiteria I hope you will be thankful for all the hard work and trouble of the many hard-working Blood farmers all around our great Country.

  THE QUANDARY

  Miss Lonelyheart

  c/o The Abalone Republican-Democrat

  PO Box 1506

  Abalone, AZ

  Dear Miss Lonelyheart,

  I am writing to you primarily because I have little other way of communicating with the outside world, utterly deprived as I am of the usual organs required for speech. Indeed, not only do I not possess a tongue, teeth, vocal cords, hard and soft palate, sinuses, hyoid bone or lower mandible, I do not even have a face. My body pretty much ends where what remains of my neck joins the center of my brother’s chest, approximately midway between his nipples. Beyond that is little more than the partially formed and entirely rudimentary remnants of my cervical vertebrae, leaving my brain to float more or less freely within my brother’s chest cavity, attached to the upper few inches of my exposed spinal cord like a tethered balloon.

  One would, I think, be hard put to imagine a brother more intimately close to his sibling than I. My brain doesn’t really float around willy nilly as I may have suggested—instead, it is softly cushioned among Oswald’s pillowy lungs, with the right temporal lobe pressed cheek to jowl—as it were—against his pulsing heart. While I cannot hear that organ, I can distinctly feel its rhythmic throbbing.

  To the outside world, I understand that I present an unprepossessing appearance, looking something like a very large, headless, desiccated frog pressed tightly against Oswald’s chest. A frog about the size of a one- or two-year-old child, its emaciated arms and legs awkwardly bent and folded something like the wings of a plucked chicken.

  You might ask, and rightly so, how I, deprived as I am of virtually every sensory organ normally dispensed to human beings, can have any idea of what my external appearance may be. Well, that brings me to further details regarding the unusual relationship between my brother and myself, which, I think you may be beginning to apprehend, is something rather unique. While we do not share any vital organs, our nervous systems are intricately entwined. While I can no way read Oswald’s mind, I can and often do share his sensory input and, on occasion, his emotions as well. What he sees, hears and feels I can, if I wish, see, hear and feel as well. The latter particularly so if the emotions are primal, powerful and deeply felt. The happier he is, the more I am able to share in that happiness; the angrier he is, the angrier I am. And, as you will see, this ability is also responsible for the high level of my education.

  Our mother, who died during our birth, was, I am saddened and even a little embarrassed to say, an X-ray technician who had become addicted to crack cocaine several years before our conception. When she discovered she was pregnant, she added alcoholism to a catalog of personality flaws which would be pointless to list here. Our father had been a temporary worker at a nearby nuclear power facility, earning extra money to support his heroin habit at an experimental drug-testing facility operated by a large, international pharmaceutical company, but he abandoned my mother as soon as her pregnancy became known and neither I nor anyone else has any idea where he might be now. Our mother apparently took one look at Oswald and myself and promptly turned us over to a local orphanage who, in turn, was only too happy to see us disappear out the back door in the arms of the entrepreneurial proprietor of an itinerant sideshow: Phineas Phool’s Phunny Pholk. I learned, some years later, that he paid $175 for Oswald and me, which at one time I considered an insultingly low figure. But I’ve since considered the possibility that the orphanage may have been in sore need of funds and that perhaps even that small amount helped feed and clothe a few of its miserable inmates, so that perhaps our sale into two decades of servitude served some happy purpose after all.

  Oswald and I traveled with the sideshow, which was attached to one circus after another, like a peripatetic barnacle, for nearly twenty years. It really wasn’t such a bad life. We had plenty to eat and a warm place to sleep and congenial companionship. After all, people such as the Rubber Band Man, the Turtle Girl and the Boy With No Head were really in no position to point fingers at us.

  What became clear fairly early on in our career was that I was much the brighter of the two—something that I had for many years already suspected. Oswald was in no way retarded, at least not very much, but he was certainly what people might call “slow”. Which is why his seemingly voracious appetite for books and magazines surprised and puzzled so many people. They little realized that it was not Oswald, of course, whose interest in reading was so great but rather the hideous little dwarf that dangled from his chest. So far as I could tell, the words meant nothing to my brother (though I imagined he enjoyed the pictures in the illustrated volumes), but I, through his eyes, absorbed a first-class, if haphazard, education. By the time we reached our late teens, however, Oswald had become obese and was soon in danger of becoming morbidly so. When he examined his naked body in a mirror, I could see that I was reduced to only my extremities being visible, the rest of my body buried within great rolls of puckered fat. This reduced our audience appeal, as you might readily understand. Not that people objected to seeing an obscenely fat man—Tweetsie the Fat Lady outweighed my brother by a good quarter-ton—but that they objected to being unable to see what they’d paid good money to see: a horrible parasitic twin embedded in the chest of his brother.

  Considerations for my brother’s health and our personal finances finally forced us to do something about his ever-increasing weight. Diets—and we tried everything imaginable—had proved worse than useless. We finally consulted a physician who told us what we had already expected to hear: Oswald’s condition was glandular. A few tests and it was discovered that an assortment of tumors had for years been playing havoc with his pituitary and thyroid glands. Happily, the necessary operations would be fairly simple procedures, albeit expensive. They would deplete our savings to an unprecedented and frightening level, but if we didn
’t make the investment we stood to loose everything, permanently. And in addition to the threat of reduced circumstances, I was, of course, wholly dependent on Oswald’s continued good health. My life span is fated to be not one second longer than his.

  Of course, as doctors have done since our childhood, this one urged my brother to have me removed. I, for one, can forgive him for, in his innocence and ignorance, he could have had no way of knowing of the brilliant mind that lay just behind Oswald’s sternum, nor of the intimately close relationship we shared. I had no fear, though, since Oswald, as always, flatly refused to consider the matter and that was the end of it. Oswald, although mildly retarded, was of age and in no legal way incompetent, so there was no way for either the doctor nor the law to force the issue. The doctor, like all those before him, assumed that Oswald feared the loss of his livelihood and not the loss of his dearest friend and closest companion. A not unwarranted nor unkind assumption, since it would be obvious to anyone that my brother would be incapable of supporting himself in any other way than as he had been doing all his life. People may have found the idea of exhibiting one’s deformities as a living repugnant...but that didn’t stop them for one second from shelling out their dimes.

  Before proceeding with the operation, the doctor insisted on performing a thorough physical examination—as much for his own curiosity as for Oswald’s well-being. He did so and what he discovered was a considerable surprise—not to say a blow—to us all. Once he began poking around he found that Oswald’s abused glands were the least interesting of his peculiarities. Oswald, he announced, possessed both male and female sex organs. He was, in fact, a nearly perfect hermaphrodite. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with this, he said, and, of course, I immediately realized that this would only make Oswald that much more of an attraction in the sideshow. A parasitic twin attached to a half-man, half-woman would be unique in the business. But unfortunately the confused hormonal stew that coursed through his veins was having a deleterious and potentially fatal effect on his health.

  So, reluctantly, I shrugged what little shoulders I had and let Oswald agree to the operation. Unfortunately, the doctor said, there was no way for him to tell in advance which way the procedure might go. He would have to see which organs appeared to be the most viable and work from there.

  To keep this letter from growing to an intolerable length, I’ll simply say that it turned out that once Oswald’s hormones finally came into harmonious balance, what emerged from the vast billows of fat was an extremely attractive, slim, intelligent young woman. She adopted the name Osweena.

  And Osweena and I soon made some extremely interesting discoveries, not the least of which were entirely new applications for our unique ability to perfectly share one another’s emotions and physical sensations. While my withered-looking arms appear to be useless they are in fact as agile and supple as a spider monkey’s, the fingers long, sinewy and strong as steel wires. There was little of my sister’s body, we discovered, that was beyond my reach and we spent some considerable time investigating just what my limits might be. There were few as it turned out. Needless to say, my sister had no trouble on her part. I was after all, in every part as accessible to her as a lapdog.

  It would be difficult for me to wholly express—even if without the restrictions imposed by the nature of this missive—the degree of pleasure that Osweena and I bring to one another. It is more than the mere physical pleasure I can bring to her and she to me...as I imagine a moment’s reflection on what I have already written will reveal to you. Sharing a nervous system as we do, we experience one another’s pleasure simultaneously with our own. When I touch her, I feel what she feels and, of course, vice versa. This is probably the best moment to mention that in spite of—perhaps in compensation for—my withered, spider-like body my manly apparatus is more than normally adequate in size and volume. While I may resemble an anorexic, hairless monkey in every other respect, my nether bits are elephantine.

  Now I begin to approach the real thrust (as it were) of this query. Dangling as I do from between my sister’s delightful bosoms, my nethermost regions are on the same level as her own delightful private parts. It would be entirely possible—from a physiological standpoint—for us to have intercourse. Needless to say, we would be perpetually limited to the missionary position, but we see that as no particular handicap. No, the question we have is this: If parasitic twins have sex, is it incest or masturbation?

  Looking forward to your reply, we are

  Sincerely yours,

  Oscar and Osweena Spartito

  THE FUNERAL

  I still think they’re Russian,” said Brother Aloysius. “After all, they occupied this base until the Reformation—at least twenty years.”

  “You might be right,” I said, “but it really doesn’t seem to make much sense.”

  “Brother Raoul is right,” said Brother Bernard. “Why would they have hidden the bodies this way? If you want to call it hidden, that is.”

  “That’s exactly my point,” I said. “They weren’t hidden. I mean, yes, they were in that cave, but they weren’t buried in any real sense. You’d think if the Russians were trying to cover something up, they’d have buried them out in the desert. No one would have ever found them there.”

  “There’s that,” said Bernard, “and the fact that they were buried—entombed might be a better word, I think—with some ceremony. These bodies weren’t simply dumped into the cave willy-nilly.”

  “True,” said Aloysius, “but...”

  “But what?” I said. “There’s really nothing at all to suggest that they were Russians.”

  “Well, who else could they have been? It’s obvious they’re not Chinese.”

  He was right about that. The two bodies we’d found in the cave were not Chinese, though they had occupied the base for nearly ten years prior to the Russians. It hardly required a forensic specialist to determine that. The Martian atmosphere had freeze-dried the corpses as throughly and efficiently as any museum might have done a prized specimen. Mars provided nothing to corrupt the bodies, other than what they themselves contained: their own chemistry and the action of the bacteria in their guts as, starving, unrestrained and driven by a need for their own survival, they turned on their erstwhile hosts. But even these processes were hobbled by the lack of moisture in the Martian atmosphere and the utter lack of oxygen. To say nothing of an atmospheric pressure that was only kept from being called a vacuum by a technicality. The bodies surely had been thoroughly desiccated within minutes of being exposed to the environment—certainly within less than an hour.

  In any event, the process preserved the bodies meticulously. Except for the parchment-like quality of the skin and the expected results of almost instant dehydration, there was little to complain of cosmetically...though the corpses’ substantiality was more illusion than fact. One could have effortlessly punched a pencil entirely through one of them. In fact, something very like that happened only moments after their discovery when Brother Julius, misled by their appearance, had tried to lift the arm of the woman...and was dismayed beyond all measure when his fingers sank into the massless, unresisting flesh like a pitchfork through a puffball mushroom. I understand he still has disturbing dreams about it, eight decades later.

  In any event, the point was that it was clear that the bodies were not Chinese. The man could easily have been Russian. Nearly two meters tall and muscled like a stevedore, he must have been a formidable specimen in life. The woman, though...She possessed an exotic beauty that was profoundly puzzling. I might even say disturbing. It’s hardly necessary for me to say that most of our attention had been focused on the woman—since she was obviously the strangest of the two. We had no explanation for her physical anomalies. She seemed to be raceless—or it might be better to say that she seemed to be a blend of the best of all the human races—a quality many Polynesians had when there were still such a people. The skin of both the man and woman had been altered by their exposure to the
Martian climate. The male was as brown as leather. So was the female, though she seemed to all of us to possess a reddish cast that made her resemble a statue cast in purest copper.

  “Besides,” Bernard had been saying, “they had obviously been laid out with some ceremony. This was surely not the result of some clandestine disposal.”

  “And we have, after all,” I added, “all of the records of the Russian occupation. Everyone’s accounted for.”

  “If you trust the Russians,” Aloyisius said uncharitably.

  “Perhaps they were members of some cult, operating within the Russian camp. That’d explain why there aren’t any Russian artefacts.”

  Everyone agreed that this seemed a likely hypothesis. In the years immediately preceding the Reformation, Eastern Europe had been rife with heathenish cults and sects of all sorts.

  The bodies were still in the cave at that time...though it is a little inaccurate of me to keep calling it that. There are no caves on Mars...at least not that anyone has become aware of. What I’m talking about here was a deep excavation between two parallel layers of hard rock where, untold millenia ago, a bed of ice had once been. In one of those eras of warming that Mars periodically undergoes, the ice had melted, adding its part to the flood that had gouged out the canyon below and creating, in the process, the deep, low-ceilinged chamber in which we had found the two bodies a fortnight ago.