Shadows of the Emerald City

by J. W. Schnarr

  Once the wall and the signs were built, Tidikins went off, some say to the Quadling Country, and some say to the Winkie country, and some say to the Emerald City, where he became a pedicurist of some note. For in Oz, nearly everyone must walk, and so nearly everyone has corns, and they were all very glad to have a pedicurist in their midst, especially one who could paint toenails such lovely shades of green.

  Meanwhile, the Fuddles stayed scattered in their village, unable to piece themselves together, and unable to see that they were trapped behind a wall without a door, completely hiding their village from anyone who might walk by and see them, lying in helpless pieces everywhere in the village.

  The pieces did not worry very much at first. None of them could see the signs posted on the wall:

  Do not ENTER on pain of ETERNAL BEFUDDLEMENT

  Even if they had, they might not have worried, for they knew as well as anybody that in Oz, many of the inhabitants - especially the inhabitants of the Emerald City - ignored such warnings all the time. Plus, they had their own Advertisement on the Yellow Brick Road. They did not know that Tidikins had pulled this sign down, to keep others from being Fuddled.

  But after a few weeks passed, they began to worry. No one had come, and they could not move, not even a bit of an inch, unless some kind soul might pass by and put some of their pieces together. And as the weeks passed, the pieces of Fuddles began to realize that this less and less likely.

  After a week and a half, it rained. It may seem odd that a fairyland would ever be troubled by rain, but even in a fairyland, plants and trees need water, and Oz’s fabled crops of buttered popcorn and bread and butter and snow cones and buckwheat pancakes could not grow without rain. And so the magical rulers of Oz had decreed that rain should fall.

  Rain had not overly troubled the Fuddles before. Since the Fuddles only scattered themselves when they saw other people, and since other people never visited Fuddlecumjig in the rain, they simply moved inside like ordinary people would, and waited for the rain to end. But now, they couldn’t. The rain fell on them and made them very wet and cold. They could not shiver, but they could feel the cold. And the rain, they knew, would not be good for their wood.

  But they did not despair. They still had the wind, and the wind might - might - lift their pieces just enough so that with a twist or two they might maneuver themselves closer to their other pieces, might be able to snap together a piece or two, or three - although three was perhaps too much to hope for. Enough to make half a mouth, possibly. Enough to scream for help.

  But although the winds of Oz are gentle and playful, none of them seemed to want to move the pieces.

  It rained again, and again. The pieces began to sink, just a little, into the mud, and their colors began to fade, just a little, from the rain and the sun

  Still, they told themselves, it was not so bad, even when winter came, and the pieces shivered in the snow. For Ozma, after some discussions with Glinda and the Wizard of Oz, had decided that it would be a pity to deprive the children of Oz from the fun of playing in the snow, and thus allowed winter to enter Oz each year, if only for a few weeks - just enough for everyone to enjoy a good sleigh ride and snow sculpture building contest and hot chocolate, but leaving before anyone got tired of shoveling snow. The snow began to warp and damage the wooden pieces a bit, but they did not worry too much, deciding that they could always repaint themselves once they were put together, and perhaps ask Glinda the Sorceress to replace particularly warped pieces. And surely someone would come, after winter had made everyone feel irritated and grumpy from being housebound.

  But spring came, and the flowers of Oz sprang up, and no one came to Fuddlecumjig, or its wall.

  The pieces were just about to settle into general apathy when a bird appeared.

  A bird, the pieces thought. A talking bird of Oz. For, since Oz is a fairy country, most of the animals of Oz could talk, and the pieces hoped that the bird might see them scattered behind the wall, and tell other people about their sad plight. In this way, they hoped, they might be rescued. The pieces that contained part of their mouths opened and closed, although they made no sound. They tried to wink their partial eyes.

  The bird opened its beak, and swooped down. If the pieces of Mrs. Chippie could have screamed, they would have, as the bird swallowed a piece of her neck and a piece of her hand and a piece of Mrs. Cotton’s hand. The pieces tried to huddle together for comfort in the stomach of the bird, but a bird’s stomach is constantly churning, and the acid in its stomach soon began to dissolve the pieces. And then, although they were made of a magic wood that had never felt pain before, the remaining pieces of Mrs. Chippie and Mrs. Cotton felt that strange and hideous sensation, and knew without knowing how they knew that those pieces had been permanently destroyed.

  The bird flew away, and the pieces of Fuddlecumjig stopped hoping for more birds.

  But. A kangaroo had lived nearby, they remembered. A kangaroo wanting mittens. But more weeks passed, and the kangaroo never came, and soon they gave up hope of that.

  The pieces thought of other times. Of the time when Mr. Butterclip had been pieced together with Mrs. Carrottop’s legs, giving him strange ideas about both Mr. and Mrs. Carrottop that were not appropriate for a fairyland. Of the time when Mrs. Chippie had been given Mr. Butterclip’s head, and subsequently learned about all of those inappropriate feelings for Mr. and Mrs. Carrottop, and her immediate plans for certain types of parties that were also possibly inappropriate for a fairyland, but sounded like great fun and a nice change from the eternal cycle of scattering and mixing and being puzzled together. They thought of the time when little Fi Fyghter had almost set a match to some of their pieces, which, being made of wood, could burn, even if they were magical, and the fear that had filled the scattered town at the thought. And how this threat had come again and again, for like everyone in Oz, little Fi could not grow old, and therefore could not learn the danger of fire to the Fuddles, until his parents had finally left. For the Gilikin country, the Fuddles had heard, and they could not help but hope, even in their fairy and contented state, that the entire family had been eaten up by Kalidahs on the way.

  Dorothy, they thought. The little princess of Oz had come to their town once and with the help of her aunt and uncle and the Wizard of Oz and her sharp eyed hen had rapidly put many of the Fuddles together. Dorothy was certain to come, and so they settled in the mud as another rainstorm pounded on them, being to warp their wood. Dorothy will come, they thought contentedly.

  But Dorothy, being a Princess of Oz, had many fine puzzles to play with in her charming apartments in the Emerald City, and besides, had other adventures to tackle. Perhaps, had she read about the plight of the Fuddles in Glinda’s Great Book of Records, she might have come, but the Great Book of Records had only mentioned the building of the wall, not the slow sinking of the pieces of the Fuddles into the mud, and the agony of their distingration, and so Dorothy knew nothing about it, and Dorothy did not come.

  The houses fell into pieces, as houses will, when no one lives in them and keeps them repaired. Deep within the mud, the Fuddles knew none of this. They only felt their pieces drifting apart, bit by bit, felt their wood disintegrating, felt - and they could hardly even remember the word for this, so long had it been since they had known anyone who had felt it - pain. Searing, agonizing pain, that grew only worse as the wooden pieces continued to disintegrate.

  And when the Munchkins finally came, they saw nothing but fallen houses and mud. Befuddled, and distressed that such ugliness could appear in the finest of fairylands, they quickly pulled down the houses. They used the wood to build another wall to hide the village until it could grow pretty and green again.

  But even when this was done, and Fuddlecumjig was no more than a small mention on a map that few people ever saw, and even as their pieces dissolved in the mud, the Fuddles could not quite die. After all, they were fairy folk, of a sort, and in Oz, no one ever dies, even when that person’s pieces are
scattered throughout the land.

  But even in eternal Oz, with its eternal memories and people, no one remembered the Fuddles, or knew of the horrible weight of the mud above them, and no one heard their endless attempts to scream.

  The End.

  Four A.M. at the Emerald City Windsor

  by H.F. Gibbard

  Once upon a time, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz gave a girl named Dorothy Gale a brick made of solid gold. He meant it to remind her of the long and winding yellow brick road that she had traveled through the Wonderful Land of Oz.

  That was her story, anyway. More likely, she turned a trick for the brick. With a Munchkin, maybe. Either over or under the rainbow. It didn’t much matter when Dotty was in slut mode.

  When she got back to Kansas, Dorothy gave the gold brick to her Uncle Henry for safekeeping. Five years later, when she married The Great Cagliostro of Knoxville, Henry re-gifted the brick to the two of them, pretending it had been his all along.

  A bribe was what it was. Bert understood that now. Baksheesh, to get him to make an honest woman out of the wiliest whore of Oz.

  1:21 a.m.

  Bert Lister, formerly known as the Great Cagliostro, walked the thin green carpet of Room 143 of the Emerald City Windsor Hotel, drunk, muttering to himself, trying to forget why he was here. A pungent smell of cigarettes, marijuana, and cheap incense followed him around the dimly-lit room.

  It was ten years today that he’d married Dorothy Gale. Their nuptials had taken place at the biggest Unitarian Church in all the Land of Oz. All of Oz had turned out, from the hammer-heads to the flying monkeys. The Wizard himself performed the ceremony. In the centerpiece at their reception had sat Henry’s gold brick, looking like something crapped on the table by an aureate Pegasus.

  Now the brick was long gone, long spent. As were all the illusions that went with it.

  Bert paced like an animal in a cage, his drunken words mumbled in rhythm with his wobbly footsteps.

  “I bet she fucked ‘em all before she met me. Cowardly Lion, with his gigantic cock. Tin Man, Mr. Iron in the Pants. Scarecrow, gave her a rash. Winkie Soldiers, two or three at a time. Maybe even ol’ Witchie-Poo herself.”

  Surrender, Dorothy indeed!

  Admittedly, it was hard to imagine Dot pleasuring an old biddy like the W.W.W. She liked men too much. She was the only girl Bert had ever screwed who could come three or four times in a row without help. She’d been fun, at first, sure, but then…

  He halted and stared over at the cracked emerald mirror above the bedside table. Below it, the numbers on the clock glowed an angry red at him. 1:21. Just over two and a half hours to go.

  He resumed pacing, thinking of how it had all gone so wrong. She’d loved him as Cagliostro, thrilled to his feats of might and magic, in bed and out. But then, after they’d married, she’d shown a practical streak. A certain parsimonious attitude she must have inherited from Uncle Henry and his dour grey Kansas ways.

  He began muttering again.

  “Made me quit the magic biz. Steady employment, she wanted. After that it was shit work. Desk job at a carriage factory. Plastered allatime. They fired my ass. What’d she expect? Then she stopped sleeping with me. Just screwing my friends. And then—”

  But he didn’t want to think about what happened then.

  1:24 a.m.

  Scraps of memory tumbled around in his wasted brain like blood-soaked rags roiling behind the glass door of a Laundromat dryer. He remembered fleeing their suburban palace, drunk, leaving Dotty sobbing, screaming. He remembered her hand bent weirdly backwards, her bleeding, blood, blood on her face—

  He shuddered and moved back along the wall, breathing hard, swallowing heavy, steadying himself by slipping his fingertips along the paneling. The room seemed to sway with his steps, like a ship. The green shade on the bedside lamp cast a ghostly glow onto the battered chest of drawers and the narrow space between the twin beds.

  1:25 a.m.

  He was at the back of the room now. His tan jacket hung neatly in the closet on the single hanger provided. The jelled spatter on it made it look like he’d come through a shower of red rain. Gnawing his lip, looking down at his sticky legs, he noticed a similar pattern of still-damp spots on his black jeans.

  1:31 a.m.

  It was all her fault. He’d had a hard day looking for work, with nothing, nada, no leads even. To feel better he’d stopped at a bar and had a couple of mint juleps to calm his nerves. Just a couple. He’d walked through their front gate, feeling no pain. And then she’d been all over him, riding his ass, about the job, and the money, the booze…and their tenth anniversary, where the hell was her friggin’ present?

  Now he stood washing his arms with rolled-up sleeves at the sink in the little bathroom in the back of Room 143 of the cheapest fleabag hotel in the Land of Oz. The soap sliver fell to the cracked emerald-tiled floor. He bent to pick it up. He peered down at the soap for a minute, watching it spawn red bubbles that slid languidly onto the floor. The bubbles reflected the fluorescent light from the fixtures flanking the mirror.

  The bubbles suddenly struck him funny. He laughed, a hard laugh, nearly without sound.

  He stood and gripped the sink, looking over his own muscled forearms, admiring them. Hard brown eyes, bleary and bloodshot, stared back at him from the dirty mirror. The steam and the cracks in the mirror warped his reflection, made it look like a stranger staring back at him.

  He twisted his head around, inspecting himself. His face and thick neck were clean but unshaven. He felt a tremor go through him.

  No one saw, he whispered to himself.

  No one.

  The flophouse lobby was poorly lit with garish green neon. He’d been holding the jacket, folded over his arm. And the spots on his pants and shirt just looked like old, dark stains.

  1:35 a.m.

  Tinny was the real problem.

  The Tin Man had warned him after last time, with a theatrical tremor in his hollow, metallic voice: Lay a hand on her again, asshole, and I’ll chop you up into fish food.

  This time, though, he had ol’ Metal-Head covered. At least, he hoped he did. She’d call by four, and that would be that.

  He’d fled the house too fast to change clothes, jogging toward downtown dodging traffic with his bloody flannel shirt tail hanging out, leaving her screams behind him. He’d checked in and stumbled through the door to number 143 and headed straight for the room phone, an ugly avocado plastic fixture with filmy gray push buttons.

  Somehow he’d managed to stab in their home number. Reached automated voice mail. Threw the phone in a rage on the bed. Then picked it up again, after the beep, and bawled out his message into the silent receiver.

  Amid the agonized apologies, he’d given her a deadline to call him back. Four o’clock.

  Smart. Now he couldn’t leave the room. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t even shower. He had to sit here and wait for her damned call. Until four o’clock. Hours away.

  He sat down on the bed again, his head in his hands, sweat seeping down his fingers, rocking autisticaly. For all he knew, the Winkies were there already, at his house, their red flashing lights playing over the for sale sign, over his crumbling driveway. Over the neighbors’ driveways.

  1:42 a.m.

  On a sudden impulse, he jerked open the drawer to the bedside table. The Gideon Bible lay alone inside, its faded jade cover worn from use.

  He wasn’t a religious man. But any port in a storm.

  An unexpected warm feeling rose in his chest and forced open his mouth. He was remembering something now, through the boozy haze. Something from his childhood in Knoxville, long before he came to the Miserable Land of Oz.

  He remembered the dotted lines on maps in the back of the Bible that traced the progress of the Children of Israel through the Promised Land. He remembered happy little colorful maps in blue and pink and bright yellow thumb-tacked to a bulletin board and ice cream cups with wooden spoons and him singing “Stand Up, Stand Up for
Jesus” at the top of his lungs to impress the big-chested high school girl who ran the Vacation Bible School class…

  A tear slid down his cheek.

  “Oz, you’re such a shithole,” he muttered.

  The Gideon Bible fell apart in his hands. The binding had been sliced through, the cover cut away from the pages. He peeled away the cover in a daze. The pages, too, had been cut, hollowed out and removed to form an empty niche in the center of the book.

  In the abyss carved into the middle of the Gideon Bible, he found—what? A whiskey flask? No. Something else. Another, smaller book, bound in smart brown leather. As he shook it loose he felt his eyes widen slightly with wonder and fear.

  He’d flopped in plenty of cheap hotels before. As a teenager he’d toured with his garage band, Space Ghost. Then later on, he’d done the magic biz. He knew what went on in these places. People gave birth in the rooms, went crazy in them, cheated in them, died in them.

  And sometimes they left things behind when they checked out.

  The little book’s leather cover felt strangely warm to the touch. He picked it up slowly and held it under the table lamp, turning it over in his hands. The cover was inscribed with a hand-tooled title: “The Magnificent Secret of Oz.”

  He opened the book. Inside the front cover, clipped to the first page with a large paper clip, he found a hundred dollar bill. He raised the bill up to the light with both hands. Ben Franklin stared back at him, looking prim and self-satisfied.