Peculiar Tales by Ron Miller

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