Munmun(7)

“I just need to make a quick stop at my house, if that’s allright with you,” he said.

There was nothing really to say to that except okay fine.

We rattled in his bag as he bounded up the steps to his huge fairytale house.





LIFEANDDEATHWORLD


The smell of the house put us all on edge. It was fake vanilla and lemongrass but to cover the high sharp notes of animal piss. In the great hall atleast six middlepoors zipped around in atleast three cleaningcars, craning and laddering up the walls and tabletops to wipe and scrub. The guy’s wife appeared in a hallway, folding up yetanother big bendy screen.

Middleriches have big facefeatures, forthatreason they can be terrifying even when they’re not trying to be. So this woman’s big blazing eyes on your eyes were like hands on your throat, and when she opened her mouth her teeth leaned fiercely out of there. But definitely the worstofall part was, her hands gripped and cuddled a nasty crappy lynxcat, and it stared at us too with round hungry eyeblacks.

“Oh great,” she boomed. “Some new houseguests, huh.”

“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.