Free Half World by Hiromi Goto Page B

answers, the questions felt slower. More viscous. As if it were motor oil instead of water. Melanie clutched the orb in her lap. Don’t let me down, she prayed. Please. I really need help.
    She raised the ball to her ear and shook it gently. “What now?” she asked aloud.
    Her voice sounded very small in the concrete stairwell.
    She turned the 8 Ball over so she could peer into the window.
    The triangle took ever so long to float to the surface.

    Melanie hissed with frustration. The urge to throw the ball down the last three steps so it broke into pieces was a wall of red flames behind her eyes. Stupid, stupid raccoon! Why had it given her this useless thing? Maybe it was a trick. Meant to get her into trouble instead of help her! How was she to—
    Melanie caught her breath.
    The edges of the triangle were crumbly, as if they had been worn away . . . like the ball was beginning to decay. Melanie clutched the 8 Ball to her belly. Now that it was on the verge of disintegrating, it suddenly seemed precious. She had so few things left. Don’t let this be lost, too.
    No matter what, Melanie thought as she swallowed hard, the thing she had to do was clear. She had to find her mother. She had to bring her home. She replaced the plastic orb, reshouldered her pack, and stepped down to the landing. She turned the knob of the door, drawing against the heaviness to reveal a tiny crack, and held it open.
    The noise assailed her first, the myriad scents rolling in immediately after.
    It was a lobby of a hotel, but not like any hotel lobby she’d ever seen on television or in films. Across the enormous foyer, above the front desk, was a large banner: THE MIRAGES HOTEL. The sign looked as if it had been painted by students for a school dance.
    The entire room was filled with the squawk of voices, loud, volatile, punctuated by raucous laughter. The shrieks of birds of prey, the hooting of lemurs, the jangle of coins and tooting horns. The rich aroma of cooking meat filled the air, and the enormous room was smoky with singed flesh and dripping fat. The acrid edge of burnt sugar, beer drying in the carpet, animal dung and cigarettes. Melanie felt simultaneously famished and nauseated.
    The lobby was like a bazaar: a combination of a trade show and a market square. Businessmen with crocodile eyes slid payments of frogs and lizards into each other’s pockets as if they were passing envelopes of money. A few finely dressed ladies had bird beaks instead of lips or reptilian tails trailing out behind their gowns. In little tents and booths merchants displayed their wares and shouted at potential customers, cajoling, begging, screaming for their patronage.
    Sunglasses and thongs, flip-flops and wedges, silk scarves, razor blades, glass eyeballs, and skin grafts. Selections of breast implants were displayed on gleaming platters like rows of dead jellyfish on fun house mirrors. Dietary supplements were sold with promotional deep fryers and cotton candy machines. Rhino horns, tiger penises, knives, hourglasses, cuckoo clocks, helium-filled balloons, skewers of meat, candied ice, mini donuts, metronomes, rolls of lace, caged birds, snapping turtles, perfume or poison in small glass vials, and bottled water. Melanie stared, agog, with one eye through the crack in the doorway.
    The wrongness wasn’t just the freak show before her: there was no color. . . . Melanie closed her half-open mouth.
    What she had thought were evening hues, the varying degrees of dark and light from her view atop the mountain, were also here, in the brightly lit lobby of the hotel. Everything looked like a black-and-white movie, Melanie thought. She didn’t know if there was really color and only she couldn’t see it because she was an outsider, or if it was colorless for everyone.
    Melanie’s heart caught in her throat.
    She whipped up her free arm to stare at the skin of her hand.
    In the dinginess of Half World her skin seemed to glow