Crap Kingdom Read Online Free PDF Page A

apart, they’re set.”
    “What if your thing that you wear gets dirty, and you want something else to wear while you clean the first thing?”
    “I don’t understand,” Gark said.
    “Well . . .” Tom felt weird being the position of defending laundry.
    “I guess we haven’t picked up on a lot of the stuff about clothes yet,” Gark said. “They’re still a pretty new thing around here. You still get some old-timers who remember a time before this portal brought clothes in, and they like how it used to be, so they’ll just be, y’know . . .”
    “Naked?” Tom said.
    “Yeah,” Gark said.
    “Good to know,” Tom said.
    Tom spotted a skinny kid wearing an extra-extra-large T-shirt commemorating a church bake sale, standing on a little island of denim, his body pretty well hidden by hanging laundry. He was stuffing pairs of briefs into the pockets of his gym shorts. The oarsman saw him, too. He drew the bloodthirstier of the two oars out of the water, reared back, and whacked the kid with it. There was a wet smack and the kid went flying. The oarsman laughed. He looked back at Tom. Tom forced a close-mouthed smile. He didn’t want to display any knockout-able teeth.
    “What do you call the thing that kid was grabbing?” Gark asked. “With, like, the stretchy stuff that goes around your waist?”
    “Underwear?”
    “Yeah,” Gark said. “Kids love that stuff. I don’t have much use for it myself.”
    “Also good to know,” Tom said.
    They reached a wooden dock. “Thanks for the lift,” Gark said. “I’m Gark, by the way.”
    “I know,” said the oarsman.
    “Oh! And this,” he said, becoming puffed up and grand, “is Tim.”
    “Tom,” Tom said.
    “
Tom
,” said Gark. “Well, can’t sit here all day chatting.” Gark hopped up and off the raft in one swift motion and, after his right foot got caught on a loose dock plank, fell down and got back up in six awkward motions. He turned and extended a hand to help Tom up onto the dock.
    “You okay?” Tom said.
    Gark nodded, wiping blood away from his nose with his other hand.
    “Our transport awaits!” Gark said as he led Tom down a crisscrossing series of docks and gangplanks toward dry land. He’d said their modes of transportation were very different from the rental van, and Tom was excited to see exactly how different. Would it be a cart pulled by a weird four-legged pack-beast? Maybe the transport would just be the beast itself, and when Gark whistled it would lower its head, allowing them to climb aboard.
    Tom had never realized he had so many expectations for fantasy worlds. Now that he was actually in one, he found that he had tons. One of the things he expected was a population of strange beings very unlike himself, whether they were reptile people or bird people or minotaurs in astronaut helmets. On the dock, though, he was surrounded by what appeared to be humans. No one had strange alien ridges on their noses or pointy elf ears, at least no one he’d seen so far.
    Even in a world where everyone else was human as well, he expected to be stared at by strangers because of his out-of-place Earthly manner of dress. Yet as he and Gark walked through the crowd on the docks, no one stared at him, and it didn’t seem like it was because they were worried that he might melt them with his gaze or that they would be executed for daring to make eye contact with the Chosen One Whose Coming Was Foretold. It seemed like the reason no one was staring was that they had the same number of eyes and teeth and limbs he did and they were wearing clothes like his, from Earthly stores in Earthly malls, so they were indifferent to him just as he would be to a stranger he passed on the street who wasn’t attractive or famous or peeing their pants because they were crazy. A teenage girl with red hair and pretty green eyes passed them on their left and as she did so, Tom tried to catch her eye. It worked, but when she looked back at him she gave him