Next Door to Dorothy

Next door to Dorothy, there’s another girl who stays behind in Kansas, who sleeps through storms, her father a slab-faced drunk, mother vicious with regret for this brood she should have drowned at birth, because they so distract her from her spells & weather-making. The daughter hides in her bed & petitions the great and powerful wizard for a way out.

Thirty years on, oblivion doesn’t seem any closer. She has two kids of her own, now, who creep quietly past her bedroom door. A tornado comes & makes off with the neighbor’s roof. Sirens, helicopters. She stirs awake. Why couldn’t it have been me, my house, she asks the crack in the ceiling.

Oz is only three clicks of the mouse away, & the fact that it’s no place like home is an inducement to visit often. But we read her latest messages & lose our appetite for dancing in circles. Weeds sprout between the yellow bricks. Maybe I should retrieve that old heart from its safe-deposit box? I lie awake shivering as the first serious snowstorm of the year turns the world back to black & white.