Munmun

by Jesse Andrews

  “A little,” I say.

  “Hope so,” says the doc. “Tonight you’re back in the cage with the others.”

  Then she gives me a few hours to think about it.

  Late afternoon, some guards pick me up in my bed, lower it into a box, take me out into the yard, not telling me anything.

  In the yard again is Kitty.

  Look at her, now she’s a girl who used to be the girl from seedflowerbirdhouse but not anymore, now a teenager, longerfaced.

  Nightsky hair in a braidnest, stacks of loops like piled tires.

  Rivercolored skin, muddycream with freckles and explosions.

  Scrunchy lips bunching a smile of, I expect praise.

  A little walleyed, specifically the right eye a littlebit wall, not quite looking at you, what does it see instead.

  “I found someone’s ratballoon,” she tells me.

  “Mine,” I rasp.

  She expects praise for solving the puzzle of the mysterious huge ratballoon, abandoned in Dreamworld.

  “Why did you lie to me,” she asks.

  “I didn’t lie,” I say.

  Pause.

  “You told me you didn’t dream,” she asks.

  “I didn’t tell you anything,” I say.

  Pauseagain.

  “Oh,” she says. “Right, because you don’t talk.”

  I want to tell her, I used to talk, I used to babble like a happy maniac, but here in jail they just decide stuff about you and even if it isn’t true, after a while, it is.

  But she’s too huge, I’m in the jailyard, still too much of a jailbird, I don’t know.

  “Except you’re talking now,” she adds.

  “Why do you want to study the dreams of jailedup littles,” I say.

  “Well, it’s a schoolproject,” she says.

  “Oh right,” I say, like I know schoolprojects.

  Her lips flutter, then they tell me, “I’m studying the dreaming of unfortunates, poors, convicts, mentally ill, specialneeds.”

  “Good,” I rasp, feeling bad.

  Her hands twist a little, fidgety fingers hug each other, she thoughtbubbles, maybe this was a mistake.

  But still she asks, “Can I dream with you sometime this week?”

  My heart shudders.

  “Ofcourse,” I tell her.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  I just stare at the ground because it’s just too hard now to look at someone who’s not from Jailworld, not a guard or grungy dave, instead this girl from a different world, different planet, someone else’s life.

  “Well then,” she says. “I’ll find you in Dreamworld, or you’ll find me.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  But as she gets up, gets ready to step over the wall and leave my life, I say, “Wait.”

  She stops, crouches over me, her breath is a room of gummy fakemint.

  “I’m going to die tonight,” I tell her.

  And she said whatdoyoumean, and stayed, and I told her how I got here, and the guards got moreandmore furious, but as I realized they couldn’t do anything to this middlerich princess I kept talking nonstop, huge chunks of the story, kids smashed my dad, a cat crippled my mom, we tried to find a better life at law school, Prayer got abused, Shoulderheads tried to kidnap her, a cop wouldn’t help, I scared away my sis’s kidnapper with a stolen gun and now I’m in jail and a squad wants to kill me, when I try to dream psychos bite me, life is almost over.

  We were in the yard until the sun plunked into the sea and justabout the only thing I didn’t tell her is, bytheway I dreamed with you once, longago.

  Before she left she told Wilt, I’m fixing this, you better keep him in hospital coreandteen tonight, if he ends up back in the cages and anything happens to him, my father will show you the inside of a grownjail prettysoon.

  Wilt was sick with anger but powerless, instead just ranted to me about how that uppy bitch was going to forget about me in a few days and then we’ll just see what happens, littleshit, ohmygod, can’t wait to sponge your little drips of blood off the tile in one swipe.

  But she didn’t forget,

  she found Prayer and interviewed her,

  found one of the Shoulderheads tramps in grownjail and interviewed her too,

  made a case of Maybe Warner’s Not So Bad to her cityboss dad Hue,

  she and dad went to the cityboss of the Dreamoughs,

  and the citybosses agreed to exchange the favors of,

  Kitty’s dad donates personal munmuns to a Dreamough publicgarden,

  Dreamough cityboss pardons me.

  • • •

  Pardon means, nevermind the rest of your jail sentence, ourbad, Warner you are freetogo.

  They threw open the middledoors of kidjail for me and I walked through, blinking at the localnews cameras, Kitty’s family of giants standing around in elegant suits and dresses. Her dad Hue lowered his hands to me. I stepped onto his fingers and he lifted me up to his perfect face, eyes of sparkling darkness, smile of blinding whiteness, and here’s what happened next, please hold your breath, close your eyes, it gets more amazing.

  “Warner,” he boomed and purred, “this is a great city in a great country but it can be very hard on littlepoors, too many of our citizens are suspicious of you, think that you cannot be rehabilitated, however I believe you are a young man of great integrity and resourcefullness, and infact I am so confident in your goodness, I would like to scale you up and bring you to live in my home, eat with my family, sleep under my roof.”

  I couldn’t speak obviously.

  “What do you say,” Hue grinned, wife and sons and daughter Kitty twinkling their smiles at me too, and I couldn’t stop myself, I had no control like in a nightmare.

  With the dronecams peering down at me I wept, curled up like a snail to hide my face, rolled up like a dead beetle in his perfect hands and bawled.

  IV.

  KITTY

  LIFEANDDEATHWORLD

  They scaled me up to halfscale, fivetimes my old size, hunthousand fresh new munmuns in my scale account.

  Hue Family Scale was about twoandahalf so now they just outscaled me by five.

  Although I could have been bigger, should have been bigger actually. Because what they set aside for me was twohunthousand munmuns, that ofcourse is bigger than halfscale, you end up about threefifth, sicktyonedotsix percent if you want more exactness. You’re asking, how the heck does Warner know the advanced munmath of dots and percents, look, stop freaking out, in this story I end up learning some math, we’ll get there.

  Anyway I could have put all twohunthousand muns in my scale, but there was Prayer to worry about. Because surenough, Paddy began divorceproceedings, ended the trialmarriage and got all his scalemuns back from his sad little exwife who took such bad advantage of him.

  So I asked Hue and Kitty, can my sis live with us too?

  Hue sympathized but had some doubts.

  “We don’t have another twohunthousand muns to put in your sister’s scale account, I’m afraid, and the house really isn’t outfitted for littles to live here,” he told me.

  “For sure, but I’ll give Prayer half of mine, we can each get by on a hunthousand, I know we can,” I hoped.

  “We also don’t have a second middleroom in our house,” he said. “There’s just the one.”

  “We’ll share,” I said. “We’ll share the muns, the room, we share everything, we’re used to it.”

  Hue nodded a few perfect nods.

  Then he said, “I do have to ask you something pointblank, and please forgive my directness. We don’t know your sister. The young poor kid we chose was you. You are the one we chose to give an opportunity, because we believe you will take full advantage of it. Bynow we feel like we know you well enough to judge you, and we believe you will work hard, study hard, and really make something of yourself. But we can only give this opportunity to your sister if she is going to do the same.”

  “She will,” I promised. “She will, she definit
ely will, infact she makes me look like a lazy piece of crap, she works so hard and smart.”

  Immediately I regretted saying it, but Hue chuckled.

  “Kitty, what do you think,” he said.

  From her stiff voice and low eyes, I knew she didn’t love the idea, but what she said was words of talking herself into it.

  “Well,” she said slowly, “what I know from meeting her is, she does work pretty hard, I guess really hard to be honest, very long hours, the job isn’t like demanding intellectually but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t succeed in an intellectual environment. And forsure she was forced into an unequal marriage and exployted terribly, from her history it’s clear she’s quite resilient and yeah I guess it would be a really beautifull story if she beat the odds too.”

  “Ohmygod, what’s better than that story, nothing,” I yelled.

  She smiled a little although her hands twisted and squeezed again, thumbs stuck out like cowhorns.

  “If you’re really okay with not being as big as you could,” she said, “not getting your own room for the first time, then sure, let’s give her a chance.”

  “Warner, you’re a generous kid,” Hue warmed.

  “You’re a generous freaking family,” I yelled.

  Although, was I thinking secretly about how the family could have been even more generous, I mean yeah, a littlebit, sure I did. That’s a terrible thought but also unavoidable, when you’re scaling up to halfscale and meanwhile the family that homes you still outscales you by five.

  You think, dang, they couldn’t have scaled us up all the way to their scale?

  Warner, you peenface, to do that they’d need to give you each twenmillion, that’s way too much to give to a stranger, crazy munmuns.

  But then your mindcalculator is warmed up and you start thinking, twenmillion munmuns for six people, that’s a huntwenmillion in the family scale account.

  What if this family of six joined munmuns with me, Prayer, and a hundredtwelve other littles, huntwenty of us in total, we’d all be middlescale, onemillion per person.

  Perfect fit for middleroads, middledoors, middlecars, and middlephones, the nice comfy middlelife. Sicktypercent downscale for six, sure, but thousandpercent upscale for hunfourteen, that’s every single person in the old Yewess Coastguard station.

  Warner, ungratefull jerk, can you not be chill, just let the riches be nice to you.

  Or what if the family joins tentimes as many people, a thousandhundredninetyfour littlepoors, everybody’s halfscale, an incredible life improvement for a crazy number of people, ten coastguard stations of littlepoors finally getting to live life.

  Warner, turn that freaking mindcalculator off.

  Go the other way, the family joins with fewer people, add just six littlepoors to your family of giants, the family only shrinks a little bit to doublescale, tenmillion per human, you’re still enormous, plus you made six littlefish lives amazing, doublescale now.

  Enough enough enough, I learned prettyquick to stop making calculations. Because that’s ungratefull thinking and I was super gratefull. Twohunthousand munmuns is a fortune for me and Prayer, super generous, lifechanger.

  I spent one night as a littlepoor in Hue Family Palace. Prayer was still living in the storeroom at Paddy Quickstand, not scaled down yet. Hue promised we’d get her in the morning.

  Mom Dawn fretted that the house hadn’t hosted littles ever, she hoped I’d be comfortable, ofcourse let her know if I needed anything. Dinner was blendedup soup and bread.

  “Any scale person can eat soup,” announced Dawn with nervous hope. “You know what they say! ‘Water’s water at any scale!’ And water’s a liquid. Just like soup!”

  “Mom, be a littlebit chill,” said Kitty.

  “Am I not being chill?” cried Dawn.

  Kitty made me a little pillowbed in a special halfscale bathroom, carefully smoothed the sheets with her long fingers.

  “I make these kind of flowery operahouses in Dreamworld and sing music in them bytheway,” added Kitty sort of shy, “actually that’s my whole schoolproject, I think dreammusic can basically be therapy, I’m curious to see the impact on other people with hard lives.”

  I nodded a That’s Intresting nod, hopefully not the nod of Yeah I Already Know That.

  Why didn’t I want her to know I had seen the house before, I can’t really tell you, guess I just needed a secret to protect from giants.

  Anyway that first night out of jail I couldn’t get all the way to Dreamworld, kept dozing off and then startling awake to the deep robothum of the middlerich house, darkblue bathroom light, gentle aircurrents, faroff smells of buttery wildflowers breathed by machines.

  In the morning Hue, Dawn, and Kitty drove me to the bank in their threelane limo. Dawn held me over the glassbottom so I could watch as we straddled and swallowed the middlecars below.

  “It’s so exciting that you’ve never been in one of these before,” Dawn told me.

  “They’re fun allright,” boomed Hue, as copcars and ambulances drifted behind and underneath.

  We left the car in bigparking and as we wandered around the bank to the littledoors, dronecams and reporters hustled after us, snapping pics, cooing reports.

  Hue lowered me to the door and we beamed at the cameras.

  “See you in there, Warner,” Hue winked, the glassy bankdoors hummed open, I crept inside.

  So when you grow up littlepoor, talking to other littlepoor kids about munmun and scale and banks, you hear theories about bankers. Bankers are robots, bankers are ghosts. Don’t hide in the tellerroom at night because bankers will eat you. Bankers can’t make their own blood so they suck it from a dozen littlepoors a day. Bankers don’t have peens or jeens, instead when you become a banker they chop off your peen or fill your jeen with cement, et set set setera.

  So I was tensing, bracing for weird behaviors, attacks, shadiness.

  But they were all very nice and normal, mild and polite. Big smiles, soft hands. The only weird thing about them was the middlescale thing, which, okay, the middlescale thing is super weird.

  The middlescale thing was this. When you become a banker, they freeze your scale account forever at a million munmuns, even when you retire or quit or get fired. Basically it’s a guarantee of No Funny Business for all bankers. Meaning, you can’t use your job or bank knowledge to make yourself huge.

  So all bankers are middlescale forever and so down there in the halls and rooms inside a bank, every single person is middlescale, and it feels crazy to look at. Like being in Dreamworld except you’re not real, everyone else is but not you, you’re no longer a human and instead just a piece of someone else’s dreamfluff.

  Because banks need all kinds of different size rooms to manage all kinds of different transformations, all levels of Scale Up and Scale Down, most of the bank is underground, and the smaller you are, the deeper you go. So a littlevator like a jar in a tube dropped me deep into the earth.

  Hue stayed somewhere shallower. We vidded each other before my Scale Up and he explained, he’s meeting Paddy at Paddy’s local bankbranch, they’ll sort out Prayer’s munmuns so she doesn’t have to scale all the way down to little and then scale back up again.

  “Dawn will drive you home, I’ll bring Prayer home with me after work tonight, and we’ll all see each other at familydinner,” said Hue. “Enjoy your new scale, Warner. We’re all expecting great things from you.”

  “I will, thank you, ofcourse, the greatest things, you’re welcome,” I burbled like a maniac.

  I guess another strange thing about bankers is the hoods and coats, muncolored coats and hoods everywhere, the pinks and creams of toys and cakes.

  • • •

  A bankdoctor interviewed me, asked me medical questions.

  “Have you had dental work, crowns, fillings, molds,” he said, squinting into my little mouth.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Have you ever been to a dentist?” he asked.

  “N
ope,” I said.

  “Okay great, and nothing artafishill in your body, no screws, stitches, pacemakers, bloodtunnels, anything like that,” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Has a doctor put any foreign objects in you, things that aren’t part of your body,” he said.

  “Do doctors do that?” I asked.

  “Not if they’re not supposed to,” said the winking bankdoctor.

  “Firsttime, huh, congratulations,” warmed a nice banker outside the scaleroom, holding cute diagrams, “so here’s what happens, we’ll be giving you scalemeds, singing ritual songs, and then leaving you in a tub to fall asleep. Now because of the scalemeds, Dreamworld is going to seem a little strange to you. For one thing, your dreambody will be changing scale.”

  “Wait, what, is that even possible,” I said.

  “It’s what naturally happens when your body is changing scale here in Lifeanddeath,” instructed the banker. “One more thing, your dreaming will be completely solitarry, meaning alone, you are not going to encounter any other dreamers.”

  “Holy crap,” I said.

  “It can upset and even harm dreamers to see other dreamers change scale in Dreamworld,” taught the banker, “believeitornot, in some cases that spectacle can make people go insane forever, it’s so unsettling and deestaybullizing. Fortunately there is a med called solodream that can wall you off from every other dreamer, so dontworry! We’ll give you a ton of it, it’s completely harmless, no known sideeffects, it’s kept Dreamworld safe from scaling dreamers for many years.”

  I was quiet and infact couldn’t really believeitornot.

  “Meds change dreams?” I asked eventually.

  “In ways we don’t even know about!” cried this cheerfull banker. “Anyway have fun!”

  I watched silently as the bankers prepped the tub, thinking about solodream and scaledream, I mean what the heck, how many other worldshaping things do I not even know exist.

  “What do you think of the underbank,” asked another nice banker finally.

  My blown mind tried to think of a joke.

  “Did you guys all mean to dress the same today or was it an accident,” I said.

  “Ha ha ha ha ha,” she said without really laughing.