Munmun

Jesse Andrews

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781760635602
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A brilliant satirist brings inequality to life in this one-of-a-kind read which is both hilarious and heartbreaking. In an alternate reality a lot like our world, every person's physical size is directly proportional to their wealth. The poorest of the poor are the size of rats, and billionaires are the size of skyscrapers. Warner and his sister Prayer are destitute - and tiny. Their size is not just demeaning but dangerous: day and night they face mortal dangers that bigger, richer people don't ever have to think about, from being mauled by cats to their house getting stepped on. There are no cars or phones built small enough for them, or schools or hospitals, for that matter - there's no point, when no one that little has any purchasing power, and when salaried doctors and teachers would never fit in buildings so small. Warner and Prayer know their only hope is to scale up, but how can two littlepoors survive in a world built against them? Brilliant, warm and funny, this is a social novel for our times in the tradition of 1984 or the work of Douglas Adams. Munmun is satire at its finest: brilliant, insightful and at times hysterically funny. It's a powerful look at class, wealth and power in our modern world. - Nicola Yoon, bestselling author of EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING

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.

What if this family of six joined munmuns with me, Prayer, and a hundredtwelve other littles, huntwenty of us in total, we’d all be middlescale, onemillion per person.

Perfect fit for middleroads, middledoors, middlecars, and middlephones, the nice comfy middlelife. Sicktypercent downscale for six, sure, but thousandpercent upscale for hunfourteen, that’s every single person in the old Yewess Coastguard station.

Warner, ungratefull jerk, can you not be chill, just let the riches be nice to you.

Or what if the family joins tentimes as many people, a thousandhundredninetyfour littlepoors, everybody’s halfscale, an incredible life improvement for a crazy number of people, ten coastguard stations of littlepoors finally getting to live life.

Warner, turn that freaking mindcalculator off.

Go the other way, the family joins with fewer people, add just six littlepoors to your family of giants, the family only shrinks a little bit to doublescale, tenmillion per human, you’re still enormous, plus you made six littlefish lives amazing, doublescale now.

Enough enough enough, I learned prettyquick to stop making calculations. Because that’s ungratefull thinking and I was super gratefull. Twohunthousand munmuns is a fortune for me and Prayer, super generous, lifechanger.

I spent one night as a littlepoor in Hue Family Palace. Prayer was still living in the storeroom at Paddy Quickstand, not scaled down yet. Hue promised we’d get her in the morning.

Mom Dawn fretted that the house hadn’t hosted littles ever, she hoped I’d be comfortable, ofcourse let her know if I needed anything. Dinner was blendedup soup and bread.

“Any scale person can eat soup,” announced Dawn with nervous hope. “You know what they say! ‘Water’s water at any scale!’ And water’s a liquid. Just like soup!”

“Mom, be a littlebit chill,” said Kitty.

“Am I not being chill?” cried Dawn.

Kitty made me a little pillowbed in a special halfscale bathroom, carefully smoothed the sheets with her long fingers.

“I make these kind of flowery operahouses in Dreamworld and sing music in them bytheway,” added Kitty sort of shy, “actually that’s my whole schoolproject, I think dreammusic can basically be therapy, I’m curious to see the impact on other people with hard lives.”

I nodded a That’s Intresting nod, hopefully not the nod of Yeah I Already Know That.

Why didn’t I want her to know I had seen the house before, I can’t really tell you, guess I just needed a secret to protect from giants.

Anyway that first night out of jail I couldn’t get all the way to Dreamworld, kept dozing off and then startling awake to the deep robothum of the middlerich house, darkblue bathroom light, gentle aircurrents, faroff smells of buttery wildflowers breathed by machines.

In the morning Hue, Dawn, and Kitty drove me to the bank in their threelane limo. Dawn held me over the glassbottom so I could watch as we straddled and swallowed the middlecars below.

“It’s so exciting that you’ve never been in one of these before,” Dawn told me.

“They’re fun allright,” boomed Hue, as copcars and ambulances drifted behind and underneath.

We left the car in bigparking and as we wandered around the bank to the littledoors, dronecams and reporters hustled after us, snapping pics, cooing reports.

Hue lowered me to the door and we beamed at the cameras.

“See you in there, Warner,” Hue winked, the glassy bank-doors hummed open, I crept inside.

So when you grow up littlepoor, talking to other littlepoor kids about munmun and scale and banks, you hear theories about bankers. Bankers are robots, bankers are ghosts. Don’t hide in the tellerroom at night because bankers will eat you. Bankers can’t make their own blood so they suck it from a dozen littlepoors a day. Bankers don’t have peens or jeens, instead when you become a banker they chop off your peen or fill your jeen with cement, et set set setera.

So I was tensing, bracing for weird behaviors, attacks, shadiness.

But they were all very nice and normal, mild and polite. Big smiles, soft hands. The only weird thing about them was the middlescale thing, which, okay, the middlescale thing is super weird.

The middlescale thing was this. When you become a banker, they freeze your scale account forever at a million munmuns, even when you retire or quit or get fired. Basically it’s a guarantee of No Funny Business for all bankers. Meaning, you can’t use your job or bank knowledge to make yourself huge.

So all bankers are middlescale forever and so down there in the halls and rooms inside a bank, every single person is middle-scale, and it feels crazy to look at. Like being in Dreamworld except you’re not real, everyone else is but not you, you’re no longer a human and instead just a piece of someone else’s dreamfluff.

Because banks need all kinds of different size rooms to manage all kinds of different transformations, all levels of Scale Up and Scale Down, most of the bank is underground, and the smaller you are, the deeper you go. So a littlevator like a jar in a tube dropped me deep into the earth.

Hue stayed somewhere shallower. We vidded each other before my Scale Up and he explained, he’s meeting Paddy at Paddy’s local bankbranch, they’ll sort out Prayer’s munmuns so she doesn’t have to scale all the way down to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• I. Prayer
• II. Grace
• III. Wilt
• IV. Kitty
• V. Markfive
• VI. Usher
• VII. Kingkong