Peculiar Tales by Ron Miller

Author:Ron Miller [Miller, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2014-12-10T05:00:00+00:00

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

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