Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond (33 page)

“I’m Glinda. The Witch of the South. South is always the Glinda. That’s the way it has to be.

“Once you get to be East, you can be the Eva. But until you get there, you have to be the Dorothy.”

Dorothy looked at Glinda. “I
am
Dorothy.”

Glinda rolled her eyes and tossed the second silver shoe on the floor with the first. “That’s what I just said. Until you’re East, you’re the Dorothy. Now put on the shoes.
They’ll take you where you have to go. But hurry up. Oz doesn’t like to wait.”

The shoes gleamed at Dorothy, brilliant as the sky outside. Outside. Glinda was rude, and Dorothy had no idea who Oz was, but the shoes were beautiful, and she wanted to go outside. She sat and began to put them on.

“It’s my name, I mean. Dorothy. The name I was born with. Dorothy Gale.”

“Well, maybe that will help you, maybe it won’t. But you’ve got to
be
the Dorothy now, until you’ve become East. Oz needs to have a Dorothy.”

Dorothy had finished buckling the silver shoes while Glinda was talking. She stood up and took a couple of steps. The shoes were comfortable, more flexible and less heavy then she had expected. She clicked her heels together, and they rang like the tolling of a bell.

Glinda looked at Dorothy and sneered. “This isn’t the story where doing that takes you home, even if you had said the words.”

“I don’t know what story you’re talking about, and I don’t want to go home.” Dorothy pushed past her, out the door of her transplanted house, and into the fantasy of color beyond.

Behind her she heard Glinda say, “You will.”

When a path has been set, it is very hard not to take it. That difficulty increases when the path is one that has been made just for your feet.

Or at least for the shoes your feet are wearing.

There was a path outside the door to the house that had carried Dorothy and Toto from Kansas. It was laid with
bricks, bricks a rich, welcoming color, the golden yellow of buttercups. Dorothy stepped onto it, because that is what you do when there is a path right outside your door.

You do not think that it is strange that your house that has been picked up and flown elsewhere in a storm, has also been set down so perfectly in its new location that the door frame lines up exactly with the boundaries of the path. Nor do you—if your eyes are dazzled by the glint of silver on your feet, the gold of the path, the emerald of the surrounding grass—look back on the one gray splotch in the midst of this rainbow: that very house.

And because you do not look back, you do not see that your house has begun to fade. Not further into gray but into invisibility, as if it has become less present now that you are out of it. As if it no longer matters.

Nor do you see the bare feet, small enough to fit into the silver shoes that you are now wearing, attached to the legs that are crushed beneath that house.

Everything changes after a storm.

When twilight fell, even Technicolor Oz became gray. A textured gray, a gray with nuance and depth, but gray all the same. Perhaps because she was used to seeing in such a palette, when the colors of Oz faded with the light, Dorothy saw what the rainbow brilliance of the day had been hiding.

Oz was full of the shades of girls.

They were there, in the fields just beyond the yellow-gold path she walked on, in the fields of corn and the fields of poppies, in the forest beneath the twisted limbs of the trees. So many girls. Watching.

They looked to be about Dorothy’s age. They watched her as she walked, and Toto’s ears and tail drooped under the weight of their eyes. He whined, and Dorothy wanted to droop and whine as well.

She looked deeper into the gray, at the girls hanging in the air. None of the girls were wearing shoes.

When she stopped for the night, Dorothy tried to take her shoes off.

The straps had seemed to glue themselves together, and she could not unfasten them. She tried to slide the shoes from her feet, but they wouldn’t move.

Dorothy hit the shoes with a stick and then with a rock. She bruised her ankle—a blossom of blue and purple—but the shoes didn’t even scuff.

Oz needed a Dorothy, Glinda had said.

Dorothy needed to walk until she was East, Glinda had said. Dorothy hadn’t asked, not then, who—or what—Oz was. She had just wanted to put on the shoes, to go outside, to walk into the bright and into the color, and questions would have gotten in the way of that. But she wondered now, in the watching dark, and she wished that she had asked those questions.

Dorothy did not think the other girl’s name was really Glinda, not anymore. She didn’t think it was Dorothy either, though she thought that maybe the other girl had been called that once, as she walked south in a pair of shoes that wouldn’t come off her feet.

She thought that maybe all the girls she had seen, hanging shoeless in the shadows, had been called Dorothy, once. She wondered who—or what—had watched them, in the gray twilight, in the dark.

Dorothy patted her lap so that Toto would come and rest his head in it. She did not fall asleep until it had gotten so dark she could no longer tell his fur from the night.

The sunrise was brilliant, shades of lavender and orange. The air smelled like flowers, and the clean scent of hay. The path of yellow brick unrolled beneath Dorothy’s feet, secure in her silver shoes.

The path had moved in the night.

Dorothy had stepped into the grass when she sat down to rest the night before. Not far—she was a sensible girl, and she didn’t want to get lost, but she had wanted to sleep somewhere comfortable. She had curled up near enough to still see the curving line of yellow, and she had not moved during the night.

But with the rising of the sun, the yellow bricks were there, beneath her shoes as she stood.

Dorothy stepped off the path. Nothing happened.

She walked farther away from it, her feet getting heavier, and her steps getting smaller, until it was impossible for her to take another step. The air shimmered with purple, hung green at the edges, and in a small whirl—a tornado in miniature—the yellow bricks were in front of her again.

Oz needed a Dorothy, and seemed to have specific ideas about what it was that Dorothy needed to be doing. There was only one path for her to take, and it was the path that Oz put in front of her.

East.

Dorothy took a deep breath, stepped onto the inescapable road, and kept walking.

“Have you asked yet?”

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.”