Munmun(5)

Usher ambushed us on our way out of the church. We were strapped up with little pouches of extra clothes and waterbags so he knew something was up.

“Are you leav ving?” he asked.

“Prayer’s going to law school,” I said, so it wouldn’t break his heart.

“Oh w woww,” said Usher.

“Yeah,” I said. “So, Prayer, tell him goodbye, and thank him for guarding you all those times obviously.”

But Prayer was making extra big eyes at him and Usher was frozen like an animal corpse and my heart kind of flopped over, I knew what she was doing.

“Well hey,” she said. “Not so fast. Usher, you can guard me one last time if you want.”

Poor lovesick dumbass, he had no chance. So off we went the three of us, on the mission of Take My Homeless Cantread Sister To Law School.

The Dockseye entrance to the Metro had three kinds of doors. Way off to either side you had battered eighthdoors for littles like us to go through, onefoot high, just need to pay two munmuns for those. Next in were the halfscale doors, about fourfeet, littler middlepoors get to use those, ten munmuns please. Then in the middle you have big glossy twoandahalfscale doors for bigger middlepoors and most middleriches, a twenmunmun fare for dressy ladies and sweatsuit gentlemen striding through. And ofcourse if you’re bigger than twoandahalfscale you don’t fit on the Metro, but when you’re that big you don’t want to squeeze into trains with other losers anyway, instead you’re zooming around on the bigroads in your own monstertruck.

All entrances had floortoceiling doublesliders so littlepoors couldn’t race through, plus you had sternlooking muncounters roaming around with brooms. And as for paying three twomun littlefares, forget it. Fortunately I had a plan.

“Fortunately I have a plan,” I announced, and I jogged out of the entrance and up the sidewalk, and Prayer and Usher jogged with me, and we jogged for an hour or two all the way to where the tracks came up out of the ground. Sure enough, you had here and there some ratscale holes in the sidewalk and fencing where the rats could wriggle through.

My idea was, follow the rats, because rats get in the Metro all the time without paying any munmun. And the rats won’t be a problem because there are three of us, if we all just stick together then no one’s getting facechewed by a rat today.

“Warner, your plans are terrible,” said Prayer, panting, but we did it anyway. We wriggled through the holes and down onto the gravel next to the tracks, and started walking back toward Dockseye Station, and ignored the little picturesigns the Metro put up to scare littlepoors, of little circleheaded people getting pancaked by trains and deathshocked by the ground and ofcourse mauled by rats. The deathshock one made no sense, thankgod Usher was there to read some important words.

“It says t that rail in the m middle,” explained Usher, pointing to a tarcolor bar zipping up the middle of the tracks that I guess if you touched it you died.

So we stood to one side of the tracks and put our right hands on the metal wheelrail and Usher put his left hand on Prayer’s back and Prayer put hers on mine and I just put mine out in space and we followed the tracks back underground into the total blindness and walked that way for three or four hours.

It was loud, dark, long. You could hear rats rustle and chatter but you couldn’t see them, except when the train was on its way and light was leaking in around the corner, and then yes, as we scouted a place to flop down and wait for the train to pass, always a scene materialized of way too many rats all nestling up in their little chewedout bunkers, cowering from the light and the rumble.

And when finally we made it to Dockseye Station, there was no clear way to get off of the tracks and up onto the platform where people were waiting. I mean there wasn’t just a ladder up from the tracks for us with a label of Hey Littlepoors, Climb Here, Bytheway Congrats On Getting This Far Without Dying.

So we climbed the train itself. It was parked but beeping like it was impatient to leave, and we took turns clambering up the wheel, and as you can imagine palsied Usher was not amazing at that, so I had to basically pull him up onto the wheel and then drag him across some cables and finally shove him onto the metal lips between cars.

After a few stops the doors opened and some middlepoor kids came stomping through and we followed them into a car, and a kind old middlerich man lifted us onto a seat onebyone with his magazine because he didn’t want to touch us with his hands, and he even gave us a few giant hardcandies to gnaw, and the seat was blessedly soft and it did smell like a giant’s peensweat but we still collapsed into it in exhaustion.

“That was terrible and I’m not listening to your ideas anymore,” Prayer told me, but the truth was, we were atleast headed to law school, and also Usher got to touch Prayer’s sweaty back for four hours, so you have to believe it was the best time of his entire life.





DREAMWORLD


Usher took the first watch while Prayer and I slept. I dreamed the train half full of feathery coralcolor munmun bills and we sat in them like the tub.

“It’s notsogood you tricked Usher into coming,” I said.

“It wasn’t a trick,” she said. “He wanted to come.”

“Do you think Usher also wants to help you marry off to some completely other guy from Usher,” I said.

“I can’t marry someone whose mouth can’t even say the first letter of my name,” said Prayer.