Munmun(9)

“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.