Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond Read online

  The door of the house flung open behind her. “So you’re the new one, then? Well, I’m sorry for you. Put on the shoes, and off you go.”

  Dorothy turned around. There was a girl, about her age, holding a pair of silver shoes.

  “Those are beautiful,” Dorothy said. And they were, the shoes, as bright and beautiful as everything else here, wherever this was. “But the new what?”

  “The new Dorothy,” said the girl. “Soon to be the new Witch of the East. If you’re lucky.” The girl extended her arm with such force that one of the silver shoes slid from her grasp and clattered to the floor.

  “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.”

  “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 glass, 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 space 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 hers—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 t
he 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 Dorothy—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 Oz—”

  “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 shattered—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

  1.

  That little Dorothy Gale was the sorriest child I ever saw. She wore her hair in two braids that—however tight in the morning her aunt had made them—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, which—luckily—wasn’t flooding.