Munmun Read online

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Names: Andrews, Jesse, author.

  Title: Munmun / by Jesse Andrews.

  Description: New York: Amulet Books, 2018. | Summary: In a society where a Person’s size is directly proportional to his or her wealth, littlepoor Warner, thirteen, and Prayer, fifteen, struggle to improve their lot in a world built against them.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017043773

  ISBN 9781419728716 (hardcover with jacket) eISBN 9781683352617

  Subjects: | CYAC: Size—Fiction. | Social classes—Fiction.

  Brothers and Sisters—Fiction. | Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.A56726 Mun 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23s.

  Text copyright © 2018 Jesse Andrews

  Jacket illustrations copyright © 2018 by Sammy Yuen

  Spot illustration by Nathan O. Marsh

  Jacket and book design by Chad W. Beckerman

  Jacket copyright © 2018 Amulet Books

  The text in this book is set in 10.5-point Adobe Garamond.

  Published in 2018 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Amulet Books and Amulet Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

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  TO TAMARA, OFCOURSE

  Nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.

  —Jonathan Swift,

  Gulliver’s Travels

  I.

  PRAYER

  LIFEANDDEATHWORLD

  Being littlepoor is notsogood.

  I know I know, you think you know this already, howabout I just tell you though.

  I want to see if this makes you laugh. A middlerich kid stepped on our house and crushed my dad to death. Then that same year a cat attacked my mom at the dump and snapped her spine. Okay there. That’s it. Did you blurt a little giggly laugh? No you didn’t, okay good, ofcourse thanks for not laughing, sorry for being the Laugh Police. That story to me is just not super funny. But to other people, a littlebit funny. Mostly these are the people too big to worry about getting stomped, squashed, catcrippled, sewerdrowned, mudburied, any of your classic littlepoor terrors.

  We were as littlepoor as you can get, a tenth of middlescale, about as big as rats. We preferred to say squirrels, because a squirrel is a little bigger and ofcourse less disgusting. But squirrels are more like eighthscale and we were tenthscale, littler than squirrels, more exactly the size of average rats. We lived in the beachy capital of Lossy Indica, down in an alleyway near the docks. Our house was a onestory block of twinedtogether milkcrates, roofs and walls of smasheddown tincans, everynight the stovesmoke tickled our lungs and flavored our skin.

  So this middlerich kid who killed my dad, he was named Jasper, I would say he was doublescale, so he outscaled us by twenty, maybe twentytwo. His class was in the middle of a Let’s See The Middledocks fieldtrip, and he was in the situation of getting bullied and shoved by some other bigger middleriches. They chased him into the alley and gave him a shove and his balance was bad and he planted a foot right through our roof and it snapped the plastic milkcrate gridding and smashed my dad almost immediately to death, not rightaway immediately though. I was screaming and trying to stop the blood from blopping out where the shardy plastic forked him, and he was staring at me and he tried to say a few things. But ofcourse his lungs were smashed in, so, no capability to push air out of there for talking with, and prettyquick he was dead.

  This kid Jasper felt terrible obviously. And also the kids who were bullying him. I mean the bullies got out of there pretty fast, mumbling muttering and skulking away all sulky and ashamed. Jasper stuck around crying for a while, then suddenly he ran away too, like, hey, I just realized I don’t have to stay here either, whatarelief.

  Sometimes with accident killings, bigs and bigger middles feel so much guilt they’ll pay you some munmuns of Now I Can Feel Less Bad About This. But nosuchluck for us, when we found Jasper’s parents in Dreamworld they refused to pay us anything, because was it really poor little Jasper’s fault that some bullies shoved him into stepping on our house?, look at this shaky blubberer, he’s completely traumatized, infact if anything he’s a victim here too.

  I thought about asking, is it possible Jasper was being such a piece of crap that he deserved to get bullied into stepping on a house, therefore actually it kind of was his fault, but probably that wasn’t true, anyway you weren’t talking his parents into that.

  And so the next night in Dreamworld we tracked down the bullies’ parents but ofcourse they got huffy and puffy and thought it was crazy we would even ask for munmun, look, sorryforyourloss but was it our kid’s foot who smashed through your roof and killed your dad, I mean do you really think it’s fair that we give up munmuns and scale down over something like that?, you seriously do?, well, I guess you can think what you want, but unless you want to throw munmuns away on a lawyer for Accident Court, please don’t contact us anymore, again obviously though we are super sorryforyourloss.

  So we got no munmun and stayed littlepoor, but now with no dad and a busted house, and so my mom and my sis Prayer and me moved into a crowded publicgarden of littlepoors up the coast in a donated or abandoned Yewess Coastguard beachhouse, mostly wrecked families and orphans all trying to look out for each other and not get robbed or flooded or attacked by rats.

  That same stupid year, my mom was working at the dump in the middle of the night, salvaging rags, wires, burnable coals and oilrocks, when a homeless tortashell cat started stalking her, and she jumped into the well of a tire, but the cat just perched on the tirelip and started reaching into the tire with one arm the jerky way cats do, bat bat batting, rummaging around in there, and he slapped her a few times in the head and the back, and his spiky paw slashed her face, and tossed her around, and hooked and broke part of her spine, and then she couldn’t move, so the cat got bored and left.

  The doctor told Prayer and me later that our mom’s spine probably got broke worse by everyone dragging her out of the tire the way we did, so we asked him, okay doctor, what were we supposed to do, and he admitted, yeah, probably there wasn’t any equipment for it. It’s not like they make ambulances in our scale, stretchers, wheelchairs, anything. Our best option was just pick her up out of the tire and onto a rag, then pick up each end of the rag and carry about five hours to the closest hospital we knew about that had a littlepoor clinic, and the doctors did what they could. But even the littlest doctors outscaled our poor mom by atleast ten and when you’re samesize as a doctor’s hand you won’t get fixed up so great.

  So the doctors couldn’t fix her spine, and they didn’t cut her legs off but the legs didn’t work anymore, and on top of that our mom went blind in one eye and the sewing job on her slashedup face was all sloppy with giant stitches half as fat as a littlepoor finger. One nurse pitied us and gave us a chair from his kid’s dollhouse to make a wheelchair out of. Mom was a little too big for it but toobad, we had to use it. It was that or just carrying her around in a rag hammock.

 
; Our dad was dead, our mom couldn’t work anymore, Prayer was fifteen, I was thirteen, we lived with women and children, and prettymuch all of our day was trapping ants, roasting them, trying to sell roasted ant to other littlepoors, and getting the crap robbed out of us anytime we tried to take munmun to the bank. It was grim.

  “Prayer, Warner,” our mom said. “The Lord King God is wise and great but at some point you two will need to come up with some kind of a plan.”

  I was so mad all the time, it kept me from making a good plan. My plans all had to do with getting strong. I wanted to get superstrong through constant workouts and stunts, also fashion a knife or a sword or some type of weapon to carry around, basically become a guy who guards other littlepoors on trips to the bank in exchange for a cut. Or else join one of the squads that hangs out near the bank and follows you home to rob you if you didn’t hire a guard. But Mom and Prayer had no respect for any of these plans.

  “Nope, no way should you do any of that,” Mom said. “Warner, you’re going to make the Lord King God sad and mad with such dumb plans.”

  “My plans are actually kind of smart,” I suggested.

  “Bro, they’re super dumb and here’s how,” Prayer said. “Your plans are all about muscles and weapons, so, ay kay ay, they are how your lazy brain tells you, Don’t use me, use your muscles and weapons instead. That is an unmistakable sign of very stupid planning from a rightnow lazy brain.”

  “No, you’re stupid,” I argued, “because here’s what my smart brain did, it asked, what are Warner’s top gifts and resources lying around, hmmm probably these good muscles and running ability, nottomention handtohand combat skill.”

  “Manohman do you need to do some work on that brain,” worried Prayer.

  “Also think more about the Lord King God,” suggested Mom.

  But meanwhile Prayer’s plan didn’t involve working on the brain either, or the Lord King God forthatmatter.

  Instead it was a very basic and common plan for littlepoor girls of Prayer’s age who were cute, specifically, find a nice smart godfull middlerich guy, probably in Dreamworld, and maybe if he loves Prayer enough he’ll agree to get married and join his munmun with all of us and scale down while we all scale up to him, middlepoor atleast, the size of average dogs.

  “How come my brainless plans are dumb but Prayer’s brainless plan is not,” I said.

  “It’s not really my plan,” said Prayer.

  “Yes it is,” said Mom.

  “Fine,” said Prayer.

  “It’s our plan,” said Mom.

  “I said fine,” yelled Prayer.

  “Just got to find a middlerich guy who loves Prayer’s face more than his really good life,” I said.

  Mom and Prayer ignored this.

  “Maybe that guy’s in Dreamworld rightnow, how about I go look for him,” I suggested, but they kept ignoring.

  I continued, “I’ll just conk out and fly around Dreamworld yelling, Hey, sister for sale, fifteenyearold sister with aboveaverage face, one annoying sister for the lowlow price of you have to lose a bunch of scale joining your munmuns with not just her but also her mom and bro,” at that point Prayer interrupted that actually Warner you won’t get to join muns and scale up and if you want to live with us it has to be as a pet, cooped up in a littlecage stapled to the side of their middlehouse, Mom made Prayer say she was kidding but I knew she probably wasn’t.

  DREAMWORLD

  The littlerpoorer you are, obviously the more you love Dreamworld. Dreamworld is where you and everyone else is exactly middlescale and no one can get attacked or robbed or killed, and you can drive the cars and dial the phones and shoot the guns and use all the things they don’t make little enough for you in Lifeanddeathworld.

  Infact Dreamworld is unspeakably better than Lifeanddeathworld and plenty of littlepoors love it so much, it kills them. Here’s how. They decide they need to spend all their time dreaming, but without chemicals you can only sleep so much. So they get sloppy and goofy knocking themselves out with some beers or some weeds and they get super careless and prettysoon they’re asleep somewhere unsafe like a gutter or a parkinglot, and a bus squishes them or a sewer drowns them or a snake or a hawk eats them or out in the desert even bigenough spiders.

  You have to be a little mistrustfull of Dreamworld obviously because anything can get dreamed into your head by anyone. Although not really anyone and infact mostly no one, because most people don’t dream super well. So actually if you’re good at it, you can be the one dreaming into other people’s heads most of the time.

  And if you want to put something nice in people’s dreams, beautifull pictures in people’s heads, that can feel really good and even great. Infact I would say that’s the best part about Dreamworld if you have the talent and the energy for it, making nice wild things everyone’s seeing for the first time and saying, wow, holy crap, who made this beautifull dreamstuff.

  I mean forexample you could make a pool out of cloud, or mountains of teeth. You could lift an orchard of roiling boiling rivertrees out of the dirt, trunking and churning and branching. You could make accordion palaces, whale buses, glinty trains of fourwheel ants scurrying up vines of road. Give hindlegs to stoves, puppyears to the sun. Wear skirts of fishflocks flashing like leaves, make a room in a big cat’s heart. You could give a whole suburb a ceiling of sea, you could dive into it from the rooftops, peek down at the seafloor and it’s a nightsky foaming with stars.

  By you I mostly mean me, the only dreamer anymore who really plays Make Stuff Out Of Other Stuff, but maybe you could do it too.

  Anyway that’s all great and nice if that’s what you want to put in the minds of the people traveling through your dreamzone. But if you’re sad, mad, frustrated and furious, you can also make traps and dungeons. Skyless shitscapes and gutterzones mazing under the skin of the world. Buzzing burning dust, stinking poison dew, air clotted up with mean little suns. Fake light so dull and blank it dries your heart. Rooms that crumple on you like bags, weapons to keep you from dying, a place where every escape is to somewhere worse.

  You can make that too if you’re sad and mad and want to trick middleriches into a bad dream. But look, let’s say it works and a few of them end up there for a night, it’s still no good. It doesn’t really hurt them, because you can’t actually get hurt in Dreamworld. And in the morning the middleriches you tricked wake up in Lifeanddeathworld with all these new ideas of mean things they can do, and terrible things they might have the scale to make, in the world of your life where you can actually bleed and starve and die, also the world holding your delicat brain.

  A few nights before it was time to leave, Prayer caught me gutterbuilding, I’d been doing it kind of a lot.

  “Warner, don’t make that sad crap,” she told me. “Make the nice dreamzones instead.”

  “I’m too mad,” I said, and dreamed a swarm of flying spiders right into the middle of a conversation of softskinned jerks, who ofcourse began freaking out.

  “Gross,” she said. “Stop.”

  “No,” I said, and whipped them up into a whole cyclone of fluttering sputtering spiders and it was sort of fun to watch the jerks scramble around, try to dream them away and can’t, toobad, jerks.

  “Okay, look,” said Prayer. “Don’t get a big head. But you make very strong dreamstuff, pretty great when you want it to be.”

  “Can’t argue with that, I guess,” I admitted.

  “Okay, shut up and just listen,” she said. “My point is, most of us can’t even make anything half the time and all we can do is tumble and drift through other people’s foggy halfmade random crap. So don’t be a peen and please just make some nice dreamstuff for the rest of us, okay, I’m asleep and I need to relax.”

  So I dreamed the spiders into soothing glimmery glass jellyfish, swaying in the air all gentle and liquidy. But if you’re mad or sad it’s really hard to dream nice stuff without poisoning it in some way. So their glassy pearlstrings did from timetotime keep casually s
ettling around a jerk’s neck and arms and kind of strangling him a little bit.

  The biggerricher you are, usually the less you like Dreamworld. Because in Lifeanddeathworld you feel completely superior to littlepoors, but in Dreamworld some of them might be stronger at dreaming than you. And additionally just in general you can’t completely avoid talking to poors, hearing about their sufferings, getting reminders of hey, if you were born littler your life would be definitely notasgood, and ofcourse feeling guilt about breaking their houses or dumping garbage on them or killing them some of the time.

  But riches mostly don’t remember their dreams so good either, so sad or bad dreaming doesn’t bother them as much as maybe it could.

  Sometimes I let myself tumble and drift like everyone else and get a good look at other people’s dreamstuff and for the most part it was like Prayer said. No one’s stuff was as good as mine. I mean sometimes I’d see something new that gave me an idea or something I could improve upon or whatever. But mostly it was traveling through weedy dry dreamzones with nothing good growing out.

  I did once find someone as good as me, honestly probably better if you need to compare. I was above a little parky forest and right as I got the twitchy feeling I wasn’t alone, the treetops breathed a cloud of seedfluff. And the seedfluff twinkled into flowerheads, and the flowerheads sprouted into birds, and the birds drew a floating house with a thousand doors, and I began to hear a quiet hum but not through my ears, instead through my whole body so it felt like the murmur of something huge and faraway.

  I opened a door and fell down in the sky because out poured a voice like the richest drink. A voice with twenty thick dizzy flavors in it, singing a song of notes made out of notes made out of notes. I couldn’t even move. Then I could move and I opened another door and another voice glided out and wrapped the first with fluttering ribbons of itself. And again I couldn’t move, until I could, and I opened door after door and the voices all twined each other and cascaded in every direction, inward outward forward backward in and out of time, and the song grew huge and bathed me and my skin went liquid and my bones glowed.