Museum of the Weird Read Online Free Page A

reason.”
     
    “I was wondering why they did that,” the armadillo said. “Doesn’t make any goddamn sense,” said the penguin.
     

THE COTTAGE CHEESE DIET
     
    There’s no reason. There’s no reason why you couldn’t. There’s no reason it’s not possible you couldn’t possibly finish your mild cottage cheese breakfast, buy a ticket, take that train to the edge of the world, squeeze your eyes shut, dig the wheels into moist world-edge earth and make a dramatic plunge off the side, your friends and family waving good-bye as at the end of a parade when all that’s left is sandwich wrappers and the rest of a long day, sun streaming through all the windows and still a cold room no matter how much light hits every corner, even if you take the curtains and flip them over the curtain rods so there’s nothing impeding the procession of light—that kind of lazy afternoon where someone in the house mutters a promise to make banana bread but you know the bananas will spoil and cultivate bacteria, becoming dangerous like the kitchen counter you washed in your younger years first with warm water and later on with the stronger stuff, ammonia making you dizzy behind your allergen free mask, a boiling water rinse and a layer of bleach, just a bit of the stuff mixing together into what you hear is dangerous but secretly know is a chemical so powerful that certain entities don’t want you to hear about it, and by “certain entities” you mean the government, these powers in power have other plans for you but you’re one step ahead, you and your sleeves with the tricks in them and your special diet, the cottage cheese diet, the diet with cottage cheese, and as you eat the cottage cheese you hold very gently on your tongue the cottages and the people inside the cottages and the people are screaming.
     

DEATH OF A BEAST
     
    June was sitting at her desk and looking out the window, as she often did when she was thinking about her problems. It was a cold day, and cloudy, threatening rain. As she thought, June twisted a length of hair around and around her index finger.
     
    She observed a squirrel on the tree outside her window. It was perched on a small mid-tree stump which had been cut earlier that year by overzealous pruners. The squirrel was clutching his heart.
     
    Before she stopped to look out the window, June had been reading about a massive trichobezoar. Gastroenterologists removed the giant hairball from a girl on Thanksgiving morning. The hairball weighed ten pounds and was shaped like the stomach in which it had been lodged. The girl had a mental disorder that involved eating her own hair during times of duress. Romantic gastroenterologists called it Rapunzel Syndrome. When asked if the removal of a ten-pound hairball would affect their Thanksgiving meal, the gastroenterologists were quoted as saying, “We don’t get fazed by much.”
     
    It seemed as if the squirrel was having a seizure. He was shaking, and gripping the tree with three paws. The fourth was still on his chest, as if he was about to break into song. June thought it would be wonderful if the squirrel broke into song. She couldn’t take her eyes away, though she was tired, and needed to work and sleep. Helping the squirrel was out of the question, because the tree branch was eight feet from the window. June wasn’t sure what she would do to help, anyway. She could do the tiny chest compressions if necessary, but she wouldn’t be able to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She had tried a similar procedure once on a kitten, many years before, and it had not worked.
     
    The hairball girl went to the hospital to have it removed after she lost nearly forty pounds. It turned out that the mass growing in her stomach was filling her up, and though her body begged for protein and energy, everything she ate or drank fell against the knotted hair and clogged in her system. The little food she did eat would eventually break down into enough nutrients