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 a**hole in the middle of her forehead, like a baneful 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 would threaten to k** himself by a sting in the back of the neck. He never threatened anyone else, though his sting would have caused instant d**h. 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 burden. At first sight he looked like a giant, crippled centipede. He was known as the Centipeter, because he was continually making s**ual advances to anyone he could corner, and anyone who pa**ed out was subject to wake up with Centipete in his bed. One degenerate hermaphrodite known as Fish c*nt Sara claimed he was the best lay in town: Besides, he's a perfect gentleman in every sense of the word. He's kind and good, which means nothing to the likes of you... These creatures had developed in a region where the priests carried out strange rites. They built boxes from the 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. Often 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 at which everyone gathered in a round stone temple, open at the top, and prostrated themselves on the floor, a**uming the most disgusting and degraded positions possible, so that the gods would see they were not attempting to elevate themselves above their station. The habit of living in filth and humiliation finally occasioned a plague, a form of acute leprosy that depopulated the area. The surviving freaks (who seemed immune to the plague) I decided to receive as an object lesson in how far human kicks can go.