Page 3 of There's No Place Like Oz

I released the log, then I pressed my arms to my side and straightened my legs, and I honed my aerodynamics like a javelin, hoping to catch her before she flew away. I never would have imagined learning to skydive for a role in that thriller that I didn’t get would have saved my life one day, but here we were. I outpaced the falling log, then I went darting downward toward her broom. I held my hands forward and prepared to catch it before I fell.

Closer. Closer.

Her speed was a touch too fast. My timing was going to be just wrong.

Fuck!

“Hey!” I yelled to get her attention.

The witch upturned her face, revealing a near undead paleness to her skin, so light she was almost blue, while her irises were an eerie neon yellow. Her shifted attention was just enough distraction to get her to slow down. In a fraction of a second, I was catching the tail end of her broomstick and wrenching myself on top of it.

“Who are you?! How did you get here?” The woman’s surprise could only be described as a shriek. She bucked her broom trying to knock me off, but I held on for dear life. “Get off!” She shouted. But like fuckinghellwas I going to be doing any such thing. When choosing between falling to my death or being mildly annoying to a stranger, I was going with the mild annoyance.

The witch twisted the broom around viciously, and I fought the urge to smirk at her fruitless attempts to throw me. I wasn’t good at a lot of things, but I’d just say I earned the attention I got whenever I sat down on a mechanical bull in a bar. I think I made more money off of every Chad and Cletus who doubted me those days than I did my whole time in LA.

She jerked the broom again, and before I could tell her to just give up and drop me off, the log I’d been holding spoke for me. I watched in what felt like slow motion as the giant girth of wood smacked straight into her, and took her off the broom with a violent squishing noise.

I cringed at the sound, but had little time to process it as the broom shattered in half along with her. The magical transport now broken, we began drifting downward towards the ground again. I held on, while the log careened with increasing velocity, and my half of the broom floated down softly on what must have been the last of its enchantment.

The log struck the earth with a boom that sent shockwaves through the grass, and I was set gently beside it by my magical cleaning instrument.

I hopped off, then I rushed over to the log, where this witch laid skewered beneath shards of wood.

Blood coated every splinter, and heat and color dropped from my cheeks. A deep cold and deathly pale terror took my whole body. This was all my fault. I needed to save her.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry!” I pleaded as I knelt down and gripped one of the smaller splinters that had javelined through her chest. I used every ounce of strength I had to rip it from her flesh, immediately making everything… completely worse.

Cold blood erupted from her chest like a geyser, splashing into my face and coating my fluffy oversized sweater.

“Shit shit shit—I’m sorry about that too.” I said with desperate apology before plunging the stake back into her wound.

Brilliant Dorothy. Plug the hole by stabbing her again. WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

I admonished myself for my own dumb logic, but before I could do anything else to help her, I caught the angry glare of the witch as she sneered at me with the last of her life. Then, as though she was a pool toy with a pin prick, she began deflating and shriveling. Her whole body curled into itself until her body disappeared entirely. Those hot red stilettos on her feet clomped onto the ground as the only proof she had existed at all. The red dye, on what I assumed was a fine leather, began oozing into the grass, and the heels began shrinking and retracting like they were drawing in a telescope.

After a moment, they stopped shifting and they stilled in the grass in the form of silver flats. Very cute and comfortable looking silver flats, if I was being honest.

But I would never think such a thing, because that would be like robbing a corpse, and I was not a mid-century pirate or a Viking who pillaged my kills.

Also I wasn’t a killer despite any possible implication of what just happened.Which… did that really happen?I looked down at the grass where the witch once lay, and there was no trace of her body left. No trace other than the crimson that stained my clothing. It all felt so surreal, I still couldn’t register what was happening as anything more than a lucid dream.

Maybe I died in that tornado and this was heaven.

Fuck, if this is what heaven is like then Aunty is going to be pissed at all the times she avoided eating shellfish just to get into a place like this.

Maybe it was presumptuous to assume I would go to heaven in the first place in hindsight. I think after a few years in Hollywood, most people were going to hell. That uncomfortable limbo in between would be a lucky mercy for me after I skipped out on my boob job appointment to fly home to Kansasafterletting that asshole front the deposit just out of pure spite. I might have gone through with it if it had been something I actually wanted for myself, but considering I was getting surgery just because some director said he’d give me my big break if I let him mold me into his version of a perfect fuck toy, I think I’d made the right choice.

The amount of times I was used as animperfectfuck toy was still not going to look strong on my angelic resume though.

I huffed and stood up, now feeling so annoyed I’d nearly forgotten where I was or how chaotic the whole thing had been. I glanced down at my ruined sweater with irritation. It should have been horror that filled me, but none of this made enough sense to feel real.

With a harrumph, I turned to survey my surroundings.

When you set aside the violence of my entrance, it was really quite beautiful around me. Birdsong filled my ears, and soft grass brushed against my ankles and my bare feet as I curled my toes into the ground. I licked my chapped lips, tasting the trace residue of a lingering summer storm: a familiar flavor that I didn’t much mind especially when topped with sunshine.

A perfect blue sky on a perfect day. I shifted my weight from one leg to the other in grass that was soft and springy. The sun felt good as it dried the remnants of the storm and the witch from my now ruined clothing. It might have felt incredibly peaceful if not for the still raining logs and splintered branches of the farm house hitting the ground around me.

I breathed in a three count, then I exhaled twice as slow until the last clunk and thwack of falling wood came to silence.

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