William S. Burroughs Spare Ass Annie
When I became captain of the town, I decided to extend
asylum to certain citizens who were persona non grata
elsewhere in the area because of their disgusting and
disquieting deformities. One was known as Spare Ass
Annie. She had an auxiliary asshole in the middle of
her forehead like a painful bronze eye. Another was a
scorpion from the neck down. He had retained the human
attribute of voice, and was given to revolting
paroxysms of self-pity and self-disgust during which he
threatened to kill himself by a sting in the back of
his neck. He never threatened anyone else, though his
sting would have caused instant death.
Spare Ass Annie.
Another and by far the most detrimental was like a
giant centipede but terminated in human legs and lower
abdomen. Sometimes he walked half-erect, his centipede
body swaying ahead of him. At other times, he crawled
dragging his human portion as an awkward person. He was
known as Centi-Peter, because he was continually making
sexual advances to anyone he could corner; and anyone
who passed out was subject to wake up with Centi-Pete
in his bed. One degenerate hermaphrodite known as Fish-
Cunt Sam claimed he was the best lay in town. Besides,
he was a perfect gentleman in every sense of the word;
he was kind, considerate...which means nothing to the
likes of you.
Spare Ass Annie.
These creatures had developed in the region where the
priests carried out strange rites. They built boxes
from moist, fresh bones of healthy youths, captives
from neighboring tribes. Pregnant women were placed in
the boxes and left on the peak for a period of three
hours. Most of the women died, but those who survived
usually produced monsters. The priests considered these
monstrosities a way of humiliating the human race
before the gods, in the hope of diverting their anger.
These horrible freaks were highly prized, and they
lived in the temple. The women who gave birth to the
most monsters received gold stars which they were
authorized to wear on ceremonial occasions.
Once a month they held a great festival in which
everyone gathered in a round stone temple, open at the
top, and prostrated themselves on the floor, assuming
the most disgusting and degraded positions possible, so
that the gods would see that they were not attempting
to elevate themselves above their station. The habit of
living in filth and humiliation finally occasioned a
plague, in the form of acute leprosy. It depopulated
the area. The surviving freaks, who seemed immune to
the plague, I decided to receive as an abject lesson in
how far human kicks can go.
