Crap Kingdom Read Online Free Page B

said. “Well, in the name of the king, I command you to . . . do that!”
    At last, Tom could keep his eyes open for longer than three seconds without fantastic pain. He took in their surroundings. They were in the middle of a lake dotted with islands and archipelagos of wet clothing. The water’s surface had the slick, rainbow-y look of bathwater. The oarsman steered toward a specific spot about fifteen feet away from where Tom and Gark had surfaced. The other man nodded for him to stop, and then poured out the last of the soap in his bucket. He tapped the bucket’s bottom a few times to make sure he’d used all of it.
    “There,” he said, “
Now
we can go.”

    Tom and Gark sat on one end of the raft and the two clothes-raft operators stood, simultaneously rowing and eyeing them. The one who’d been holding the bucket was wearing a Cincinnati Bengals jersey and leopard-print tights, and the man who’d tried to take Tom’s head off was shirtless and wearing swim trunks that were clearly meant to be worn by a six-year-old boy. They had a pattern of sharks swimming across them, but the guy was much bigger than a six-year-old, so the sharks were all bent out of shape, too big in places and too small in others, like they’d been swimming in radioactive waters.
    The raft passed through small canyons between tiny waterlogged hills of twisted fabric. Tom marveled at the landmasses of wet clothes. He thought,
What if this is somehow a way station for discarded clothing from all over Earth? What if it’s cast-off garments from all over the universe?
He looked closely, hoping to see kimonos, or orange robes Tibetan monks might wear, or maybe, just maybe, alien fabrics of colors never before seen by human eyes.
    He saw a pair of blue jeans, and the only thing alien about them was their enormous size. Mickey Mouse, wearing sunglasses, peered out at them from a T-shirt on the opposite wall of the canyon. They rowed into a larger bay. Clotheslines were strung across it, with jackets, shirts, sweaters, pairs of pants, and every kind of undergarment hanging from them, drip-drying. The sun broke through this jungle canopy every so often, and it was like a sun shower as they floated underneath the perpetual dripping of a hundred thousand pieces of throwaway clothing.
    Women wearing outfits as mismatched as the raft guys’ stood on ladders placed precariously on the decks of larger rafts. They strung the clothes up, while more clothes were handed to them in baskets by men on rafts below. Tom watched as one of these women pulled a maroon rag out of a basket. It was twisted, the way guys would twist towels in locker rooms so they could whip each other. The only time Tom had seen this happen in real life was after freshman PE, and it was always halfhearted, like the guys involved didn’t really want to do it but thought they were supposed because they were in a locker room and that’s what you did, right? Maybe it happened more often, and with more enthusiasm, after actual competitive sporting events. Again, Tom would have to ask Kyle, his only real connection to the mysterious and sweaty world of athletics.
    The woman untwisted the rag so she could hang it up, and as she did so, Tom realized that it was not a rag. It was, in fact, a T-shirt with ARROWVIEW printed in yellow on the front. Tom had been right to think of gym class. Here, however many million miles away, if the distance was even measurable in miles, was a woman hanging up a gym uniform from Tom’s high school. The clothes that bubbled up from the bottom of the lake weren’t from all over the universe or even all over the world. They seemed to be mostly from his town.
    “Gark?” Tom said.
    “Yes?”
    “What happens to the clothes after you guys pull them out and dry them?”
    “People buy them and wear them.”
    “Ah,” Tom said.
    “Or they used to, anyway,” Gark said. “Everyone pretty much has their thing that they wear now, so unless that thing falls