Oz Reimagined Part 18

Dorothy turned around to see Glinda just behind her, walking along the yellow bricks. "Asked what?"

"To go home." As if this was the obvious question, as if everyone who came here would want to leave again.

"Why are you so sure I'll ask that?"

"All the Dorothys ask to go home. It's part of the story." Glinda bent down and scratched Toto behind the ears as she walked. "Home is never here. It's always the place you want to go back to."

"Well, I don't want to leave. I like it better here." Dorothy began the words as reflex, but they were truth by the time she finished speaking them.

"You don't miss anything? Or anyone?"

"No. I hated Kansas. And Toto's here. He's the only one I would have missed."

"Not even your parents, your family?"

"My parents are dead. Aunt Em didn't like me, and Uncle Henry didn't care. I don't miss anything about that place. It's not my home. And I don't want to go back."

There were shadow shapes in the colors when the sun came up. Image after image of lions, scarecrows, and tin woodmen lined the sides of the yellow bricks that Dorothy never once tried to step too far from.

Except, when she saw them, just out of the corner of her eye, they looked like people. Like people wearing the shapes of lions and tin woodmen and scarecrows.

Most of them watched her, but one watched Toto. "You can pet him, if you want," Dorothy said.

The lion, who was sometimes a boy, put his hand out for Toto to sniff. Toto sat, and the lion scratched the dog's neck and rubbed his belly when Toto rolled over.

"How come you don't have anyone?" the lion asked.

"I have Toto."

"But Oz should have brought others with you, to be the Scarecrow, or Tin Woodman, or the Lion. I was the Lion for my sister, when she was the Dorothy."

"Then what happened?" Dorothy asked.

"Witches don't have lions. It's not part of the story. She became a witch, and I became a ghost." The lion looked very much like a boy then. He scratched Toto behind the ears. "What's your name?"

"Dorothy."

"I mean your real name."

"Dorothy."

"Maybe that will help," the lion said. He gave Toto one more scratch, then bent down and hugged the dog. "Thank you."

Oz needed a Dorothy, Glinda kept telling her. Dorothy was happy to be that. She just didn't understand why she needed to change. She already knew who she was.

On and on Dorothy walked, past iterations of the things Oz had needed in the past. Through a field of red flowers that shimmered before her, and then parted like the sea. Through all who had been hurled in a whirlwind to a stranger place and translated into shapes not their own. Dorothy walked through all the props in Oz's story, and still she did not ask to go home.

"Have you made plans to see the Wizard yet?" Glinda asked.

"Have you ever thought it might be easier to tell people the rules at the beginning?" Dorothy asked. "Or do you just like it when people get in trouble for breaking them?"

Glinda didn't answer but turned around slowly, shoes the pale pink of candy floss spun into gla.s.s, tinkling against the yellow bricks as she revolved. Her eyes narrowed. "You're still alone."

"I'm not alone. I have Toto."

"The others should be with you by now. A Scarecrow, a Tin Woodman, a Lion. Don't you understand how this works?" There was fear crouched behind the words of the question.

"No," said Dorothy, feeling as old and gray as Kansas. "No, I don't."

"You're going to get a house dropped on you before you even become a Witch," Glinda said.

"My house got dropped on someone?"

"How do you think you got those shoes you're wearing? They don't come off until you're dead.

"That's the way this works." Glinda was talking faster now. "The story has to be told the same way every time. That's what Oz wants. If something goes wrong in the story, then one of us gets replaced. Another house. Another tornado. Another Dorothy." The words came out of Glinda in a whirlwind. "Another Dorothy, and no one knows which of us it will be until the house falls."

"So I'm stuck like this until someone drops a house on me. Then I'm dead. And it's the same for everyone else here?" Dorothy said.

Glinda nodded. "For all the Dorothys. It's different for the others. It's not their story." Her face went hard then, for the s.p.a.ce of a memory. "Houses don't get dropped on them, but they're gone anyway."

"How do I fix it?"

"You don't fix it. Oz needed a Dorothy, and it sent a tornado that picked you up and brought you here. You put the shoes on. You became the Dorothy. The story gets told whether you like it or not."

Dorothy stared at the other girl. "You're the one who gave me the shoes. You told me to put them on."

"I'm in this story, too. And I don't want a house dropped on me either."

Later Dorothy asked, "What happened to you? When you tried to go home?"

Glinda didn't say anything.

"You told me I would. You told me everyone does. So what happened when you did?"

"I left the path. I became a witch."

"You became a witch because you tried to go home?"

"No, I became a witch because I couldn't go home. And neither could anyone else. Becoming a witch was the only thing left, the only thing that meant having power. I didn't want anything I loved to get taken away from me again."

Dorothy picked up Toto, rested her chin on his head, and rubbed her cheek against his wiry fur. Witches didn't need lions, the lion whose sister had once been a Dorothy had said.

"If being a witch is the thing that gives you power, how come you haven't gone home if that's what you want? Why are you still afraid that a house is going to fall on you?"

"Because the power comes from Oz, not from us."

"Oz is the Wizard?"

Glinda shook her head. "There is no Wizard. Looking for him is just a thing you're supposed to do, to tell the story. Oz is the place. That's what brings us here."

"With the storm."

"Yes," said Glinda. "A tornado of Dorothys."

"Do you still want to go home?" asked Dorothy.

"No," said Glinda. "I just want to live."

That was what they looked like, hanging there in the gray of twilight. A tornado of Dorothys gathered like a storm about to break. All the girls who had been whirled to Oz from elsewhere, stolen to make pieces of a story, set walking on a path they had not chosen. They had been promised power, even held it for a bit. Girls who had become witches, and now were ghosts.

None of them wearing shoes.

Dorothy looked down at the silver shoes on her feet, a brilliant sparkle against the darkening sky.

Glinda said they didn't come off unless you were dead. But maybe she didn't need to take off her shoes to share them with the ghosts.

Dorothy looked at the waiting girls. "I think," she said, "these belong to you."

Their feet in her shoes were cold, and they tore through her like the wind, like a storm, this tornado of Dorothys that had once worn the silver shoes of Oz.

"Go home," she told them. "Wherever your home is, go there. The shoes will take you."

They paused in her body, ghost-feet sharing the shoes that she wore, shoes that would carry them where they needed to go. As they disappeared, Oz's other ghosts followed: scarecrows, tin woodmen, lions that were only called cowardly. One, or two, or sometimes all three. The tornado traveled though Oz this time, and the ghosts were the winds that drove it.

This, Dorothy Gale thought, this is what it was to become a witch. This is what power was, to stand still in the center of a tornado. To be the storm that brought the change.

Somewhere she had left behind, or at the back of her thoughts, a house lifted itself from the ground and flew to a home that was no longer hersa"a whirlwind in reverse.

As she stood in the eye of the storm of ghosts, Dorothy heard Toto whimper beside her. She reached down and clutched him to her chest. The winds of Oz plucked and pulled at him, but she held fast, his heart beating against hers. This was not a trade or a sacrifice. This was knowing what was wanted and walking toward it on her own path.

The tornado ended.

The silver shoes were loose, and Dorothy stepped free of them.

Some of the ghost Dorothys remained. Dorothy had expected they would.

Home is always a choice.

The colors of Oz were still there, but they were more solid now, less perfect and more true. There was no more path of yellow brick stretched out in front of her. Still, Dorothy walked.

She walked across Oz, south, south, south, beyond where the path of yellow brick had been. Now that she no longer wore the silver shoes, Dorothy could choose her own path, could walk anywhere she needed to.

Now that she no longer wore the silver shoes, she was no longer bound inside the story Oz wanted told. Oz had needed a Dorothya"not to keep telling the story but to end it.

Poppies an impossibly bright blood-red bloomed in her footsteps.

"What did you do?" Glinda asked.

"I became a witch," said Dorothy. "I took off the shoes."

"But Oza""

"Is just a place. Look."

Glinda looked down at the path of perfect yellow bricks that had led precisely to her door. It was broken, crumbling. She stepped out of her shoes then flung them down. They shattereda"shards of pink candy floss, sparkling in the sun. She kicked the shards, stomped through them until blood poppies blossomed on her feet.

"My brother," she said, "is still gone. Oz doesn't let witches have lions."

"What Oz wants," Dorothy said, "doesn't matter anymore. This is our place now. We're home."

BLOWN AWAY.

BY JANE YOLEN.

That little Dorothy Gale was the sorriest child I ever saw. She wore her hair in two braids thata"however tight in the morning her aunt had made thema"they seemed to crawl out of their tidy fittings by noon. She had the goshdarnedest big gap between her upper front teeth and a snub nose that seemed too small for her face. And she was always squinting as if she had trouble seeing things clearly, or as if she was trying hard not to cry.

Well, I suppose she had a lot to cry about, though didn't we all in those days. Both her parents had got themselves killed in a train crash coming home from a weekend in Kansas City. Not unexpected. They'd tried balloon ascension the year before and it went down into the Kansas River, whicha"luckilya"wasn't flooding.

They weren't exactly on the train; it was their car got stucka"one of the first in our part of Kansasa"and it had run out of gas, because Martin Gale had been too tightfisted to buy a full tank in Manhattan. And of course his luck being what it was, they ran out just as they were at a crossing where the streamliner, the Southern Belle, usually pa.s.sed around noon.

They were the only ones who died, because it wasn't the Belle at all, thank the Lord, just a freight hauler. But the two of them were dead before an ambulance could even get to them.

That meant little Dorothy, not quite eight, was sent to her aunt and uncle's farm to live out here in Middle of Nowhere, Kansas. It was a small holding with some pigs, horses, a few cows. And the chickens. Always the chickens, who were in Em's special care.

The house itself was quite small, just one room really, there having always been just the two of thema"Henry and Ema"so in Henry's mind there'd never been a need to build bigger. No kids, though Em had wanted them of course, but by that time she was long past bearing and worn down to a crabbed, stooped, gray, middle-aged woman.

Henry was Dorothy's blood uncle, being her father's only brother, though ten years his senior. He might as well have been fifty years older, if you judged by his looks. He was just as tightfisted, and not particularly welcoming to the little girl either, since now the one room seemed crowded, what with Henry and Em's bed at one end and little Dorothy's at the other, over by the stove.

At least Em, long-suffering as she was, tried to give the child a bit of her heart, whicha"after all those years of living with Henry on that old gray farm in the middle of the gray prairiea"was as dried up as an old pea. She tried, but she wasn't much good at it. It was a bit like trying to water a budding flower in the middle of a dry Kansas summer with a watering can poked through with holes.

'Course the Gale brothers weren't the only misers in those years. I could name a whole bunch more right in our little town and need six extra hands to count them on, especially my mother-in-law, that old witch, who didn't even have the decency to die till she was well into her eighties, having burned through a good portion of the money that should have come to my wife and me. That money would have changed our story, I'll tell you that.

I'd trained as a carpenter once, loved working with wood, but things being so difficult those days, I never got to make much, and I sold less. Instead I spent my best years hiring out to one tightfisted farmer after another. About the time Dorothy Gale came to stay with Henry and Em, I was working there, bad luck to me.

Henry had enough money saved at that time to hire three farmhands. Though he paid a pittance, it was better than nothing. And a pitiful lot we were: me, Stan, who was a big joking presence even when there was nothing to joke about, and Rand, Stan's younger brother, who was as scared of life as he was of death, having been in a near-drowning as a boy and never gotten over it. Imagine finding somewhere in dry Kansas to drown that wasn't the Kansas River!

None of us had kids, and we felt so awful for little Dorothy, we did what we could to cheer her up.

Rand found her a puppy, the runt of an unwanted litter that Old Man Baum, who owns the farm down the road, was about to drown. Rand had an immediate fellow-feeling for that dog, as you would guess. Old Man Baum had already sold the other pups in the litter, but no one wanted this stunted rat of a doga"black, with long hair, berry-black eyes, a real yapper. Even so, young Dorothy took to it the moment she laid eyes on it.