Munmun

by Jesse Andrews

  “They needed a carry to the law school,” defended the guy.

  “Grant, first of all, how likely do you think that is,” said the wife of this guy Grant. “It’s not like they can read.”

  “Usher can actually read super good,” I could have yelled if fear wasn’t crowding my throat.

  “When’s dinner,” said Grant.

  “I put a pelican in a little while ago so probably two, twoandahalf hours,” said Grant’s wife.

  “Great,” said Grant. “I’ll be downstairs.”

  “Um, with respect,” I said. “If you are not taking us to law school, that is a hundredscale okay, so again, if you could just take us outside and point which direction to jog, uh, thanks super much.”

  “Ofcourse, ofcourse I could do that,” he told us, opening a door, closing it behind us so the lynxcat couldn’t follow, heading down some stairs to a paintysmelling basement. “But please, let me offer you a little something first. Some drinking water? Maybe a bath?”

  Look, you’re never going to turn down pure sterilized middlerich water.

  He handed us shotglasses and we stood on the sinklip and filled and guzzled as the lights hummed on, and we stared out into the big cavey basement at the mountains and the milkcows.

  Of course these were not real mountains or real milkcows. They were painted and fake, plaster and plastic. The entire basement was a sea of tables holding a goofy handmade landscape for statues of littlepoors. But I mean even littlepoorer than us, which as you know is not possible. Like mousesize people we’d outscale by two or three.

  This was basically a tabletop island of no cities and instead a dozen farms, all farming gluey cows and sheep, and two random skiers escaping one random bear.

  Traintracks connected the island’s farms who I guess were too lazy to walk even fiveminutes to each other, and now Grant was putting some brightly painted trains on there, and basically it seemed like the trains were the entire point somehow.

  “It’s a hobby of mine that has really become kind of a passion, and gotten a tad outofcontrol, and, I don’t know, perhaps you’ll think it’s foolish,” he said.

  Prayer finally said something, and I didn’t know it but she was being a Prayer we were all about to see a ton of and pretty quickly hate, the Prayer of I Will Praise Basically Anything A Rich Guy Does.

  “I think it’s not at all foolish,” she said, “infact the opposite, meaning very clever indeed. Is it even possible that you made this whole thing?”

  “Well, uh, you know, I guess I did,” he said, purpling all happy under his beard.

  He put the last train on the track and pressed a screen and the trains jolted awake and started wheeling around Mountainmilkcowisland, and we watched them for a pretty long time.

  To make the guy feel good, Prayer told the story of what was happening.

  “There goes the red train into the tunnel again,” she said.

  “Now it’s coming out of the tunnel, just as fast as it went in,” she said.

  “Time to slow down though, here comes a curve,” she said.

  A couple times we could hear the lynxcat yowling and scraping at the basement door. Usher was definitely on the verge of pissing himself and I was too.

  “Are you enjoying yourselves?” Grant asked us finally.

  “Oh absolutely,” said Prayer.

  “Could I ask you something, though?” Grant wondered.

  “You could ask us anything really,” she said.

  “Do you think you might like to ride?” he said.

  We all looked at each other and were afraid to say anything but what was he talking about, no way were we fitting into any of those trains.

  “Here’s what I really like to do,” he said. “I like to make films of people of your scale riding the trains all through the countryside. It gives me such pleasure, and they turn out surprisingly well, they really do. I’d give you a few things to say to each other, perhaps.”

  Again we said nothing.

  Grant cleared his throat and said, “In exchange for taking you to law school, and water, and even a little nice pelicanmeat for dinner, it could be a nice thing to do, I was thinking.”

  “Is it a nice thing to do, or is a kidnapping going on right now,” I said.

  “Warner,” hissed Prayer. “Shut up.”

  Grant was quiet. Then he sorrowed, “I have to tell you, that hurts my feelings. As if I would ever do such a thing.”

  “Mister Grant,” said Prayer, “my brother was being rude and terrible, and later I’ll slap his stupid face. But the reason he is freaking out is, we have jobs at the law school earning munmun, and he’s worried we’re going to be late.”

  Grant frowned and nodded, like we had just reminded him of something he didn’t like.

  “So our question is,” said Prayer, “can you give us a few munmuns to be in this film? Because I think that would make all the difference.”

  Grant breathed in and blew out about a gallon of hot stinking air, his lips flapping, like, manohman, you guys are making this really hard for me.

  “Ten munmuns each,” I said.

  “Oh, okay,” said Grant. “So, thirty? Yeah, no problem. Oh, this is great! Let’s shower you up and get you into costume.”

  Prayer wore the princess outfit, I wore the soldier outfit, and Usher wore the Japanese robe. The fabric of mine was like treebark.

  “Holy crap, this itches and hurts,” I said.

  “I can’t even really move,” said Prayer.

  “Mi ine feels nice,” said Usher. His robe was silk and looked great, a little too big for him though, pooling around his feet.

  “Can we all wear what Usher’s wearing,” I asked, but Grant said no.

  “I can sw witch with p ppp p Pprayeratleast,” said Usher, but Grant said no to that too.

  “We need a princess and it has to be her,” explained Grant.

  Like I said, we were way too big to ride the trains like passengers, so we alternated between sitting on the tops of them and squeezing into opentop boxcars.

  “May I?” asked Grant, and he picked up Usher and mashed him into a boxcar with his thumb.

  “Holy crap, be carefull with him please,” I yelled.

  Prayer had the most lines. It was a lot of stuff like, “What a glorious day for a ride on the Old Bavarian Line!” and, “Now, I wonder who can be waiting for me at the station! Why, it’s the vicar!”

  As the soldier, I had to do stunts. A lot of them involved the tunnel. One stunt was where as the tunnel swallowed the train, I had to run screaming along the top from front to back, eventually not make it though and get smacked by the mountainside.

  Usher wasn’t great with lines so Grant brought in some white pinkeyed rats to sit in the boxcar with him and pretend to play cards.

  “They’re completely domesticated and have never harmed a soul,” Grant explained to sweaty rapidbreathing Usher.

  Then Grant took the tops off of some passenger trains and told me and Prayer to squeeze in and lie down in them. That was really notsogood. We were smushed inside like in toosmall coffins and the tops of the little seats dug into our bodies and faces, worstofall, we couldn’t move because Grant clamped the tops onto our backs until they snapped shut.

  We zoomed around the track like monsters, completely unable to move and trying not to throw up.

  “I do believe my stop is approaching,” I said with my face smashed into some windows.

  “Why, Loottenant, what a coincidence,” mumbled Prayer.

  “Can we try that again a little louder and clearer, please,” said Grant.

  “WHY LOOTTENANT,” yelled Prayer. “WHAT A COIN CIDENCE.”

  It got even more weird and bad when Grant took Prayer out, wrapped her up in twine, set her back down on top of the tracks, left me in the train meanwhile.

  “Okay now while the train approaches, the princess needs to struggle, but not too hard, make it look like you can’t escape, and you, I need you to steeple your fingers and laug
h like a supervillain while the train approaches,” he said to Usher. “Like this: OH, HA HA HA HA. YESSSS, YES. OH, HA HA HA HA HA HA. Like that.”

  But Usher wouldn’t do the evil maniac laugh, couldn’t but also wouldn’t, instead he kept stumbling all panicky onto the tracks in front of Prayer waving his arms so that the train with me inside would kill him first.

  “This scene is really important, infact I would say it’s pivotal,” grumbled Grant. “Can you please just do what I asked for one take.”

  Nope, Usher just shook his head desperately and stood on the tracks with arms outstretched like a zombie.

  “For God’s sake, I’m not going to let the train actually hit her,” huffed Grant. “Anyway it’s lightwait and plastic and not even going very fast, so, worstcase, I mean, no one has anything to worry about.”

  Lucky for us, Grant’s wife opened the door at the top of the stairs and yelled, “Grant, dinner.”

  Unlucky for us, as soon as she opened the door the psycho lynxcat came jailbreaking down, this yowly murderer made it up onto the table before Grant got ahold of him, lifted him up scratching and scrabbling, all we could do was watch and scream.

  At dinner, we met Grant’s kids, a son Prayer’s age, a daughter my age. The son ignored us. The daughter was called Willow and she wanted us gone completely, so she was sort of our best hope for getting out of there.

  “Dad. They don’t even want to be here,” said Willow.

  “Don’t you think they deserve a good meal, honey,” Grant asked her.

  “Ohmygod, you don’t understand anything,” she said.

  “You know, it’s good sometimes to meet people who aren’t like you,” he said.

  “Uuuuuugggggh,” she said.

  We were ofcourse sitting on the tabletop, one dish inbetween the three of us like a kiddiepool. The pelican and the broccolis were salty and slick with butterfat, therefore kind of hard to eat. Grant cut small steaks for us but you still had to hold with all ten fingers and gnaw, and they kept slipping out of our hands and back onto the plate, sometimes across the table like a jetski.

  “This meal is super good and we feel blessed to be eating it,” announced Prayer.

  Prayer was sitting next to Grant’s son. He was called Grantagain.

  “Grantagain, are you in school,” asked Prayer.

  “Uh, yeah,” snorted Grantagain.

  “Wow, that must be wonderfull and you seem smart,” said Prayer. “What do you study?”

  She was making big intrested eyes at him and trying to eat as delicately as possible, using only her fingertips and nails. I glanced at Usher and his face was grim but he was putting up with it.

  “Well, I’m still in year ten, so, you know, still everything,” said Grantagain like this was the most obvious thing ever.

  “You must be super smart to study everything, and did you say for ten years?, simply wow,” marveled Prayer.

  “Mom,” said Willow, making pleading eyes. But her mom just ignored her and frowned at her food.

  We all ate in silence. A shotglass slipped out of Usher’s greasy hands and tipped water into the tablecloth.

  “Do you think you’ll go to law school one day?” Prayer asked Grantagain.

  “I can’t deal with this,” said Willow, standing up. “I’m done.”

  “Oh come on, sweetie,” said Grant.

  “Dad, I have so much work to do, and this is so weird and messed up,” said Willow, and she walked super fast out of the dining room.

  “Sorry about that,” said Grant. “Girls her age, you know.”

  Grantagain snorted again but I caught him glancing at Prayer a couple more times, she must have noticed too because she started flipping and tossing her hair for no reason like a nervous horse.

  After dinner it was dark and Grant offered us the possibility to sleep in the basement and then he’d take us to law school in the morning. I didn’t like the idea because of the lynxcat. But Prayer and Usher outvoted me.

  Grant bedded us down on some pillows under some napkins, next to the sink if we needed it, me and Usher on one side of the sink and Prayer on the other, and he gave us silk kimonos to sleep in, and my sis and me slept in a proper familyhome for the first time since ours got stepped on.

  DREAMWORLD

  A little in anger, a little wanting to impress, I dreamed the High Dreamough hillside was a ski mountain emptying onto the top of itself, looping like Grant’s dumb traintracks, and you had to keep skiing if you wanted to escape the waddling random bears with lynxcat heads. So we all sped downhill endlessly, me and Usher and random middleriches, and sometimes someone would smack into a house or wetpainted mound of papermashay and a lynxbear would catch up to them and squash them into the ground and sit on them all snapped into place like a trainroof.

  Above us also the sky snaked with trains, twisting, coiling, eating each other like tunnels. So that made it a little bit of a shitscape, too, in a way that hopefully said to Grant, hey, I didn’t love the whole train thing.

  But he slid up to me and it was clear he didn’t get it.

  “I’m so moved by how much I’ve inspired you,” he told me in a dreammuffled way where the only way he could talk was, open your mouth and hope the words fall out.

  “Sure, no problem,” I said.

  “I’m so moved, by just how much I’ve inspired you,” he said again, because people who are bad at dreaming say the same thing overandover embarrassingly.

  “Great,” I said, speeding up.

  “I’ve inspired you, special boy,” he tried to yell.

  “Thanks,” I said, losing him.

  “Special, special boy,” he said, as cowdolls tripped him and lynxbears trapped him.

  “Watch out for those,” I said.

  I dove the skytrains onebyone into holes in the ground, they writhed wildly, more dreamers crashed.

  Usher caught me.

  “I think Prayer is talking to Grantagain,” he told me.

  “Why do you think that,” I said.

  “Well, I know she is, because I saw them talking in a house,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Well, actually more than just talking,” he said.

  “Oof,” I said.

  “I guess not talking at all for the most part,” he said.

  “I get it,” I said.

  In Dreamworld obviously you can’t bang, but you can show someone parts of yourself naked, or your whole self, and touch yourself or dance around or smush your crotch on stuff or do whatever to get someone horny, and then they start smushing themselves around too and you can give each other a sexy messy bangdream. So that’s what Usher was trying to tell me Prayer and Grantagain were up to. That’s what Prayer’s lifeanddeathbody was doing across the sink over on her pillow and it was pretty terrible to think about, and I couldn’t help but start dreaming the snow muddy and crappy, and causing more slowdowns and crashes of middleriches, et set set setera.

  “Sorry you saw that, Usher,” I said. “But, I have to tell you, I’m even more sorry you told me about it.”

  The hillside looped and I approached Grant again. He flopped and flailed to match pace with me, and I couldn’t speed past him in the thick sticky shitsnow.

  “Special boy, what is your job at the law school,” said Grant.

  This comfy middlerich jerk had kidnapped us and mashed us into trains and made us deal with crappy animals and now Prayer was dreambanging his son with the crazy hope of one day marrying him and I just couldn’t be nice anymore.

  “I don’t have a job,” I told him. “Obviously I have no job at all. None of us do. We’re littlepoor. We’re too little for real jobs. We eat garbage food and live in garbage houses and try to sell crap to each other and get robbed and there’s no way out.”

  “Special special boy,” said this doofus, who couldn’t even dream right. “At the law school, what is your job you do for munmun.”

  “Listen to me, jerk,” I said, tapdancing to float above the drying c
oncrete that trapped his skis. “I know you’re not afraid of me. But that’s your stupid mistake. One day I’ll be huge. I’ll be so bigrich, I’ll put a foot through your roof. I’ll bend down and wipe your whole stupid neighborhood off this hillside with my tongue.”

  “Warner, maybe get less mad,” said Usher.

  The caking earth also bulged with trains, snaking underground like worms.

  “I have friends who teach at the law school,” said too stupid to be afraid Grant. Finally his dreaming was becoming stronger and clearer from all the sadness. “I’ll have to introduce you. What was that last thing you said? And for that matter what has happened to my skis?”

  Manohman did I need lynxbears to catch this guy and eat him.

  “This dream has gotten rather savage,” said Grant. “You have quite a wild little mind.”

  Willow came rolling and bellowing down the hillside, and I alittlebit enjoyed how mad she was. Okay, maybe a lot.

  “This dream sucks, I hate you, and you have fiveminutes to wake up and leave the house,” she told me.

  “Cool threat,” I told her.

  “Ohmygod, I’m not joking,” she said. “I’m going to wake myself up and go downstairs and open the door to the basement, so Bixquick can chase you out of here, or eat the shit out of you, or whatever.”

  When I heard this allofasudden I couldn’t tapdance, the ground grabbed my feet and wouldn’t let go.

  Nightmares are when you can’t control your dreaming anymore, I didn’t get them verymuch but it was happening right then for sure.

  “Okay,” I said. “Well, let’s wait just a moment. That’s going a little too far to punish a bad dream that’s not even that bad, just wild and crazy.”

  “It’s not you, you idiot, it’s your slutty sister,” Willow said, and you could tell her anger was real, not just bitchy. “Your disgusting sister is in a bangdream with my stupid brother. Ohmygod. Does she think she even deserves to even talk to him? No.”

  The ground slurped me horribly as Willow refused to shut up.

  “They don’t even have anything incommon to talk about,” ranted Willow, “so she’s just skanking up all over him like maybe he’s even got half a chance to even remember her in the morning, which, no way, and I want to vom just thinking about how she came into my house and dreambangs my brother like she thinks they even exist in the same universe, ohmygod it’s so gross and embarrassing, so if you don’t crack a window and get out of here in fiveminutes, I am letting Bixquick down there and telling Dad he opened the door himself, because honestly, I mean the whole thing should make you want to vom too but I guess being littlepoor just means you don’t care when your own stupid family does something gross and pathetic,” and it seemed like she didn’t actually want me to leave, judging from how nonstop she was talking, but toobad, I danced my feet free and backflipped and dove through the ground to wipe out my dreamself and wake up.