Allice in Mysterious Land (ON HOLD)

3: Fishy

Both of us race to Miro's room, hearts pounding in our ears as his screams intensify. Once Auntie Morgan flicks the lights on, a chaos greets us.

Miro's blanket is tangled with his pillows. Spots cover them like a plague, but they're actually Mantis shrimps. Scratches and blood taint his gray pajamas. His glasses are on the floor, badly grazed. "Mom, Allice... help me!"

No sounds exit my mouth. Rage washes over me, swallowing my insides.

When there's a tug to my t-shirt, I've readied a punch. Turns out it's Auntie Morgan, a broom and a watered bucket on her hands. Tears glimmer her enraged cheeks, snot pouring from her bruising nose. "What on Dogson is going on?"

Before she weeps further, I charge to the shrimps, knocking them off with the broomstick. Some claws and feet graze my arms, some are snapped under my force. Steeling my heart, I toss them into the bucket. I avert my gaze from the unmoving ones.

Lucky I'm still wearing a sweater, or the wounds won't only reach my palms.

Once Miro's body and bed are clean of the harmful creatures, I snap my vision to Auntie Morgan. Clutching the door frame, she welcomes a trembling Miro who dashes straight into her arms.

"You're okay, right?" She brushes a brown strand from his blushing face, before observing the swollen, bitten-and-clawed skin. Miro shakes his head, sobs clambering between his words. Fear purses Auntie Morgan's lips as she sends me a wary stare. With quickened shambles, they enter her room, where she treats his wounds.

I look at the crowd of shrimps in my bucket. They climb on each other's backs, as if forming a ladder to escape. How vicious are these creatures? Are they this aggressive because of the Chiroquin?

"Uh, some died, Auntie. How should I remove them?"

"Why should you separate them?" The once quiet and seemingly-unoccupied flat emerges to life at the ruckus she causes. "They might bite you. Worse scenario: they'll use your arm to escape."

"There are thirty of them, ten dead. The rest are trying to escape. What if we return them to OCZ?"

"Don't you even think of that. You never know what they'll do to upgrade these monsters," she squeaks, "there's nothing we can do for now." Miro's screech cuts her speech short, but it soon resumes, "We must move them to another place to sort them out. Unless so, they'll bite your fingers off."

Silently nodding, I scurry to the storage room downstairs with the bucket in tow. A few days ago, on an episode of Auntie Morgan's random traveling around the city, she found a dusty metal cube with a hole on the lid. She told me that she'll try turning it into both an alarm clock and a safe, but she dumped it into the pile of junk in the storage not long after.

Will the shrimps survive inside the waterless cube? What if the space is too small for them?

I'm about to skitter back to Auntie Morgan, but Miro's train of complaints is buzzing upstairs, colliding with her gentle voice. When Miro raises his tone, she doesn't chide him. Neither does she when he yelps in exaggeration, as if she's burning him with a poker.

I smile at how her motherly side comes out in the most unexpected moments. It must not be the right time to intrude.

Lowering the bucket to the musty storage floor, I set the cube next to it. I fumble for a wide-piped funnel amidst the hills of trash, which costs me aching backbones. Moving the shrimps to their new cage tempts my temper since they can stick their claws to the surface and won't budge down wihout a shove. Separating the dead from the living also challenges my patience; how can I tell that they're really dead, not pretending?