Read Online Peculiar Tales by Ron Miller - Free Book Online

and the nipples still pointed toward the rolls of flesh below. Used to be real different, she thought. The Navy boys used to tell me they pointed up and out like them ack ack guns on the battleships down there in the harbor. She let them go and they fell back into place with soggy slaps.
    She didn’t look at the man but she knew he was laying there with his eyes open. He never closed them. They were dull and dry-looking, like a pair of stale croutons. She didn’t like looking into them. She didn’t much like looking at him , either, for that matter. She didn’t like his grey, oyster-like skin. It was sleek and poreless and had an oily sheen even when the weather wasn’t hot as hell, which it was.
    She coughed a hard, gargling cough and looked around for a tissue to spit the result into. There wasn’t one, so she held the phlegm in her mouth until she got to the sink and spat it into it. There were red flecks, but they’d been showing up for months and she ignored them. When she returned to the bed, the man was sitting half-propped against the headboard. Not for the first time she shuddered. I used to get the best-looking boys, she thought. All them pretty Navy boys and the boys what worked out down at the gym, them boxers, and the ones who threw steel around at the mills. Now look what I got to shack up with to keep me in liquor and rent. What a lousy shame.
    The man on the bed returned her gaze with his lusterless eyes. His skin was greyish and slack, with heavy folds and pleats, as though he were slowly melting in the heat. She had figured from the first time she’d seen him naked that he was one of those people who’d been obscenely fat and when they’d gotten all that blubber sucked out their skin didn’t fit them no more. But maybe no skin’d fit him, she thought, because he really didn’t match anywhere. His legs and arms all looked like they were each of them from different people. Even his fingers weren’t the right length and shape. The middle finger of his right hand, for instance, was the shortest one, while the thumb was long and bony and seemed to have an extra joint. His left hand looked more like a paw, like the super’s had looked after he’d hit it with a hammer that time and it’d swolled up like a balloon.
    The man’s face looked like those pictures she dimly remembered from her high-school biology book, the ones that showed how the face of an unborn baby evolved from month to month. The man’s looked like the one from maybe the first month or so. Except grey. And slack-skinned. And oily. He was the ugliest thing she’d ever seen. But he had plenty of money and didn’t mind spending it.
    She padded over to the dresser and picked up the square bottle that sat on it. There was still a healthy slug of gin in it and it was as good a breakfast as any.
    “Gotta make a trip to the liquor store this morning,” she said.
    “Take what you need from my pants,” the man replied. “You know where the money is.”
    He had a strange accent. Nothing she’d ever heard before—but maybe it was just a speech impediment. With a face like his, you couldn’t tell. All sorts of things might be wrong inside. When he spoke it sounded like soft things were bouncing around loose in his throat.
    “You never did tell me where you’re from,” she said, turning, leaning her soft, yellowish buttocks against the edge of the dresser.
    “No, that’s right. I didn’t.”
    “You ain’t from around here, I can tell that.”
    He was silent for a moment before replying. “I’m a Teratoma,” he said.
    “That Greek?”
    “I might as well tell you. It won’t make the slightest bit of difference now.”
    So he told her a story; they all do, eventually, but she’d heard so many she didn’t pay any attention at all. She was anxious to get to the liquor store. It was too early for it to be open, though, at least another hour, so she had no choice but to listen. Or at least pretend to listen. She’d certainly