Munmun(35)

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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 definitely 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.