Peculiar Tales by Ron Miller Page A

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