Peculiar Tales (6 page)
Authors: Ron Miller
MY FAMILY
by Wanda Fescu
W
hen Miss Tillotson told us we had to write a Essay about our familys I got worried. I did’nt think our Family was interesting enough to write a Essay about. Everyone all ready knows we are Blood farmers so what more else could I write about? My Father told me that without all the Blood farmers in the world everyone in the world would starve and die so Blood farmers are maybe the most important peopel in the world but that sounds very concieted even if it is true (it is true) so I figure that maybe because I am the only one in the class that lives on a Blood farm and because maybe no one has ever visited a Blood farm that maybe I would tell what life on a Blood farm is like.
My life on a Blood farm is not very interesting. It is mostly just hard work and that is not very interesting. At least I do’nt think it is very interesting. I have to get up very early in the morning to do my chores before school. In the Summer I have chores to do all day, so it is more hard work than when I have to go to School. When I was little I did’nt have to do very hard chores because I was too little. I just helped out mostly by helping to keep the Blood pens clean. Bloods you may not realize are not very clean animals and have to be kept very clean or they will get sick and maybe die. So they have to be washed every two or three days though some farmers only wash their Bloods once a week but they get lots of sick Bloods that way so my family always washes our Bloods at least twice a week and sometimes three times.
I also help feed our Bloods which is not very hard to do so I like to do it. Bloods will eat anything so long as its got all the right vitamins and things so you can feed them real cheap stuff and they will like it just fine. Since our farm has so many Bloods we put the dead Bloods in a machine that makes Blood food which I think is pretty disgusting but the Bloods do’nt know any different and it saves Father lots of money.
When I got older I got to take care of the young Bloods. You may not know it but Bloods are not like other animals that have young like cows or horses. They are more like cats or dogs how the female Blood has to take care of the young Blood for a long time before the young Blood can take care of itself. So when a female Blood has a young one we have to put them in special pens for maybe half a year before the young one can be weened and put in the special barns we have for young Bloods. This means that the all the females who have had young are not making blood for the farm but we end up with more Bloods in the long run so its OK. Some Blood farmers take the young away too soon after they are borned but this only makes more work for them to do so our family does it the Old Fashioned way which seems to work OK.
Now I am old enough to help with the bleeding which is more interesting and not so much hard work though it is very boring to have to do it every day. Every morning all of the Bloods go to the bleeding barn and that is where the Bleeding is made and the blood put into big tanks. The Bloods know when it is bleeding time because the forman blows a big whistel on the roof of the barn and when the Bloods hear the big whistel they know it is time for bleeding and they all get in line and go to the bleeding barn. All of the Bloods have little stalls they have to go in that are very small so they ca’nt move much because if they moved much the needles would come out and that would maybe loose a lot of blood. So my first job is to make sure each Blood is in its stall the right way and then my job is to make sure the needles are put in the right way. They have to be just right or maybe no blood will come or maybe the Blood will get hurt and have to go to the Vet. Our farm has many many Bloods so I am not the only worker in the morning we have many many peopel who help too. Little pumps send the blood to big tanks made of glass and when they are full trucks come to empty the tanks and take the blood to the place where it is put into bottles and cartons and that is where the blood comes from that you drink every day even in the school cafiteria.
Our Family farm is a very very big one and though it sounds concieted to say so it is almost the biggest one in the State. Our farm has almost 15000 head of Blood which is more than any other farm in the state except for another one that is only a little bit bigger. Taking care of that many Bloods can be very tricky and very hard work. Father has made a very special breed of Blood he calls Fescu’s Fancy and it is the best breed of Blood there is in the world. They make lots more blood than any other and are also very easy to take care of. They are also not so dumb as other Bloods so Father can use them to help with all sorts of chores which makes them useful besides for making blood and that also saves lots of money. They are very strong so they can pull things and lift things and carry things which would be hard and tiresome for a person to do. Mother has even trained some of the females to help around the house and it is very cute to see them kneading bread duogh or doing the laundery or carrying a tray to the dinner table. This is good Economy my Mother says because a female Blood who is nursing a young one can be put to good use until it can go back to the bleeding pens again instead of just sitting around doing nothing but suckling its young. A good Blood can understand lots and lots of words so you can tell them what to do and they can even speak too but of course they are just copying what peopel say like parrots do and do’nt really understand what they are saying.
When I was a little girl I used to like to dress up the house Bloods in our old clothes and they would look very cute that way almost like real peopel if you did’nt know they were really Bloods and not real peopel after all. But my Mother made me stop doing that because she said it Was’nt Right though I do’nt know why because they really did look very cute.
I wanted to write all about how Father breeds our stock but Mother said maybe I should’nt because it would’nt maybe be proper even though I think it is very interesting and Educational.
But just because most Bloods are usually very dumb does not mean that they are not very tricky and very mischivous like cats or monkeys. They are always getting in trouble if you are’nt careful and do’nt watch them carefully. Some farmers have tried to breed a new kind of Blood that do’nt have fingers but that also messes up something so they do’nt make very good blood either. My Father told me that some scientists have tried to make Bloods that have no brains at all but it costs a lot of money and they are so hard to take care of that it hardly seems worth the trouble. My family likes to do things the tried and true Old Fashioned way and when the young Bloods get to the right age we just prune the fingers from one paw. This does’nt hurt them at all and they can still feed themselfs but they can no longer be so mischivous.
But Bloods can still get into big trouble no matter what because they are maybe pretty dumb but they are clever and sneaky and very mischivous. I know everyone saw on TV what happened this Summer but maybe you have never heard an Eye Witness tell about what happened this Summer. I am that Eye Witness!
It is only because my Family is honest and has raised me to be honest too that I admit that maybe it was our fault what happened but I personally do’nt think so. Most Blood farmers keep their Bloods in many barns with maybe only a hundred Bloods in each barn. But when you have so many Bloods as my family has this means that there would be too many Barns which would be much trouble and cost a lot of money. It is said that too many Bloods together can get into a lot of trouble but our Family has never had any trouble with its Bloods and my family has been Blood farmers for a very very long time even my Grandfather and my Great grand father before him. But sometimes there is a very bad Blood who is smarter than most Bloods and when you get a Blood like that you are sure that trouble will come sometime.
One night I was awoke to terrible sounds and when I rushed to my window I saw all the lights on and everyone running around and everyone making lots of noise. I rushed downstairs (after first making sure I was decently dressed, of course!) and when I asked what was going on my Mother told me that someone had let all the Bloods out of their stalls in the big barn and everyone was afraid that all of the Bloods in the other two big barns might get loose too. And I can tell you that 5000 Bloods all going crazy is bad enough but that 15,000 Bloods going crazy would be pretty terrible! You would never think that even one Blood could do much harm seeing how they only have fingers on one paw and are usually pretty fat and lazy and everything but Boy! I can tell you that you’d be wrong to think that! They broke down the barn doors and broke through the fences and were just all over the place making the most awful noises and all kinds of terrible mischive. They hurt a lot of the hands mostly by biting and you never want to let a Blood bite you because even though they do’nt have very sharp teeth or anything they’re bites are almost like poisin and almost sure to make you sick. Their little claws are’nt much either but they can still hurt if they scratch you. But Bloods are just as big as peopel and like I said sometimes a lot fatter so they can really hurt if they jump on you or something. Anyway, they were running around all over the place thousands and thousands of them and it was just an awful mess but Father and the hands finally got them all rounded up again even though there were lots and lots of dead Bloods left all over the place. There were males and females and young and it was kind of sad to see all the dead young ones because like I said they are usually very cute.
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
