Chapter Five. Dorothy
FIVE
Dorothy
When I wake, I find the wreckage of the ceiling piled over my body. Chunks of plaster and broken boards. When I inhale, my lungs wheeze. Dust coats my tongue and my throat, triggering a fit of coughing and the jostling of the coughing sends searing pain across my ribs.
When I can finally take a full breath, I manage to call out to Toto. The sound of his claws clacking on the hardwood floor comes from my left. He appears in my line of sight, his fur a bit mussed, but otherwise intact.
“Thank god you’re okay.”
He wags his tail.
I look around to find the house is a complete disaster.
Almost everything is out of place. The kitchen table is in the living room. Uncle Henry’s favorite chair is on its side over the closed cellar door. Aunt Em’s basket with her balled yarn is resting in the kitchen sink, yarn balls scattered across the room.
Dusky blue light pours in through the jagged remains of the nearest window, edging the glass in midnight silver.
How long was I out? Is it morning or night? It’s hard to tell and if I didn’t know any better, I’d think the eerie darkness was a sign that the storm was still rolling across the plains.
I swallow, and wince against the rawness of my throat.
Water. I need water.
My movements are slow and clumsy but I manage to shift the wreckage aside so I can sit upright and then use the wall behind me to help get to my feet.
The world sways.
My ears ring.
I make my way across the room to the refrigerator and yank on the metal handle. As soon as the door is open, everything inside spills out. Glass shatters at my feet. Cream splashes across the floor. Pickled cabbage makes a splattering mess on the toes of my boots.
The pitcher of water didn’t even make it that far. It sits on the bottom of the refrigerator in a pile of glass shards. What remained of the water drips out.
I’m suddenly parched.
I try the faucet, but nothing comes out.
I turn for the bathroom and my vision seesaws. There is a dull throbbing in my head and the sudden movement causes the pain to circle around to the space between my eyes.
When I reach up instinctively to massage against the ache, my fingers come away red with half-dried blood.
“Great,” I mutter.
Trailing a hand along the wall for balance, I make my way to the bathroom and check my reflection in the mirror. Except the mirror is cracked and my reflection multiplies into a dozen tiny versions of myself.
I don’t recognize any of them.
My hair has come free of my braids. My lip is split. A purple bruise is blooming on my forehead, surrounding a deep cut above the bridge of my nose.
I’ve lived on a farm long enough to know all about concussions. I had a full pail of milk fall on my head when I was seven and messing around in the barn. It was Aunt Em who diagnosed me with a concussion when my stomach spun and I later vomited.
I check in with the rest of my body. Do I feel sick?
My head thumps.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Wait—
That’s not my head.
I return to the hall and hear the sound again, this time in the kitchen.
It’s coming from the cellar door.
“Aunt Em!”
I rush back into the main room and fall to my knees, wrestling with Uncle Henry’s chair so I can shift it aside. Once the door is free, I grab the inset handle and hoist it up.
“I’m here, Aunt Em. I think the storm is done and—”
There is a blur of white, a rush of air, then a shimmering blue light.
A woman bears down on me, feral like an animal. “Did she send you?”
“What the—”
I scurry back on my butt, but she’s on me in an instant, hands wrapped around my throat.
“Did she send you?” she screeches again.
Her eyes are wide, her red hair a tangled mess. Her breath smells of the sharp tang of corn liquor and stale tobacco.
“I … didn’t…” I try to get words out but her fingers press harder at my windpipe.
My vision tunnels. I kick my legs trying to buck her off.
“The East End is my territory,” she says, nostrils flaring. The air around her snaps blue like lightning. “The West can’t have it. It’s mine!”
Toto barks. The woman looks over and a cry of terror escapes her throat.
She clambers back and pulls a stick from her dress pocket. “Be gone, beast!” She waves it at him. Toto flies backward, slamming into Aunt Em’s open cedar chest. The lid snaps shut, the lock clicks closed.
Toto continues to bark from the inside, nails scraping at the wood.
“I don’t know who the hell you are or how you got into our cellar, but that’s my dog and he—”
She turns the stick on me, giving it two quick swipes.
Within seconds, I’m forced down onto my knees.
“Tell me who sent you,” she says.
“What are you talking about? This is my house!”
“And it landed on me!” She circles the room, eyeing some of Em’s paintings and one of the framed family portraits that somehow still clings to the wall.
With her back to me, I struggle to get up but it’s no use. It’s like I’m glued to the floor.
“Who are you?” she asks when she comes back around.
“Who are you?”
She sniffs at me and tilts her head, regarding me like I’m a drowned worm that’s slunk in looking for better dirt.
“Who am I? I am Delphine, Witch of the East, commander of these lands where you and”—she glances around at the broken house, grimacing—“your decrepit house have landed. So tell me your name, girl, before I wrench it from your throat.”
The stick is pointed at me again, her wrist bowed, ready to flick.
I have to be suffering from a concussion. There’s no other explanation.
This woman claims she’s a witch and she’s carrying around a stick like a wand.
So maybe I just need to play along until my mind snaps out of it?
“My name,” I say, “is Dorothy Gale.”
Delphine goes eerily still. Her expression is unreadable, but her knuckles are white as she clings to her wand.
There is a simmering tension in the air not unlike that of an approaching storm.
“I think I know who sent you,” she says, and then she lunges at me.
When the witch collides with me, we both fall backward. I hit the wall and the air rushes out of me.
“I’ll kill you and then I’ll kill all of them!” Her wand comes up, jabbing me in the side. Pain lances across my ribs, pressure building in my chest. I feel like I could pop from the inside out.
What the hell is happening?
The pain spreads outward, filling every hollow, and my blind instinct is to run, to run far and fast.
But this is my house, isn’t it?
I deserve to be here.
This woman doesn’t.
As tears blur my vision, I plant my feet to the hardwood floor and shove outward with everything I have.
The witch stumbles back. Her teeth are gnashed together, her eyes bloodshot.
She may have been pretty once, long red hair, a dusting of freckles on a thin, noble nose. But right now she looks wild and unhinged and I don’t know how to get her to stop.
She screeches at me again and presses forward.
I dart to the side. She slams into the wall.
I reach for the nearest object I can find—one of Aunt Em’s old butter crocks, the one that’s cracked down the center and only good for storing yarn now. I grab it by the opening and swing around.
Whack.
The crock hits the witch across the face and the momentum spins her around. Blood shoots from her mouth.
She tests her jaw, flexing it, and spits out a molar.
It pings over the floorboards.
“How. Dare. You!” She shoots forward and clips me across the face with the back of her hand.
Stars flicker in my vision.
I blindly stagger forward and hit the kitchen counter, scrambling for a weapon. Something. Anything.
I wobble on my feet.
The woman gets hold of my nightgown and yanks, spinning me around.
My fingers find a solid object and I take it at the last second, not caring what it is.
I swing downward.
The object makes instant contact.
I know immediately what it is.
Uncle Henry made me learn at a young age how to slaughter pigs. Some winters, slaughtering farm animals was the only way to survive.
And I know the exact sound a blade makes when it sinks into flesh.
The woman’s eyes somehow get bigger. Blood seeps from her neck where the hilt of the blade sticks out from her pale flesh.
Dark crimson eats away at the white of her dress.
Her lips move, as if trying to form words, but there is only the sound of blood filling her windpipe.
She comes at me, her hands clawing at my nightgown. Blood spurts from the wound, splattering across my face, splashing down my front.
She bears down on me and we stumble through the broken screen door, stumble across the front porch. Her fingers are like talons digging into me, and the horror of what I’ve done makes the world spin and my stomach knot.
Together, we spill out into the yard and my feet tangle in tall grass.
We go down. She’s nothing but deadweight now and I blink up at the sky, my breathing shallow and fast.
Am I safe?
Is she dead?
I killed her.
The seconds tick by. She doesn’t move. Not a single breath.
I think I did.
I think I killed her.
Horror seeps into my veins.
I shove her off and roll onto all fours and when I finally get my feet beneath me and stand up, I realize I have an audience.
Not one, not two. At least a dozen people. Mouths open, eyes wide. They stand beneath a darkened sky edged in midnight silver.
“She’s killed the witch,” one of them says.
“We are free,” another shouts.
“All hail the great sorceress!” a third man yells.
They shout in celebration, fists pumping toward the sky.
“What the fuck is happening?” I shout.