Free Peculiar Tales by Ron Miller

again.”
    “Thass...thass okay. Soun’s okay t’ me.”
    She took what the man had in his hand. It looked like a little meatball. She decided that whatever it was she’d swallowed worse in her time for less payoff. It was slippery in her mouth and went down easily. She followed it with a mouthful of gin. It’d had no taste of its own, though. She looked at the bottle which was now nearly empty and made an indescribable moué of disappointment.
    The man grunted and rose from the bed. As he went to where his clothes hung over a ladder-back chair, she saw the warts that swung on his body like little ornaments.
    “Jesus!” she sputtered, wiping her mouth. “Jesus! Is that what y’ bin tellin’ me? Is that it? Y’ bin tellin’ me y’ got a cancer ? Y’ give me a cancer , y’ dirty rotten bastard!”
    “No, of course not,” he said, pulling on his pants. “Nothing like that at all.” There was little concern in his voice. The alcoholic woman would be unconscious in a few minutes. When she awoke—hours from now, maybe even the next day—she would hardly remember him and she’d certainly remember nothing of what he told her. “Of course I didn’t give you a cancer. I gave you a son.”

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