WESTERNA:
You poor, deluded fool.
WESTERNA:
I guess every wolf needs a bitch.
From the barn, a scream. “Kill him!”
Later, much later, when they had gone to the city, when the money ran out, when she began working down in the valley, making the money she had always wanted, getting high on the high life, it occurred to him to wonder which of them she’d meant.
But that was later.
He tenses, jumps. His heavy sails forward, hits the man in the chest.
The sound of a shot. Yet he feels no pain. His jaws come down and find the man’s neck and tear.
There’s a scream from inside. An old woman, her aunt, crying. Hitting him—he barely feels her. He tears chunks of flesh and chews and the blood fills his mouth. He swallows, and howls, a terrifying, keening sound that makes the old woman cower away from him.
When he is done he goes outside. She is waiting for him, her eyes wide, her lips trembling. She is flushed. She wears only her thin night dress.
“Oh, Oz,” she says.
He growls and then he is on her, licking at her wounds, his tongue rasping across her soft, delicate skin.
“Oh, Oz!”
He doesn’t know if he is man or wolf. He only knows that she’s with him.
INT. CLUB WICKED—NIGHT
WESTERNA:
I could kill you right now and be done with it.
OZ:
Why don’t you?
He feels sleepy, later, with the feeding and the sex. It’s the first time they had gone all the way. “Get up,” she says. She is already dressed. “We need to bury him. It’s a shame you didn’t kill the other one.”
“She’s just an old woman,” he says, shocked. Dorothy shakes her head. “Sometimes I just don’t know about you,” she says. She had gone through the house, he saw. She shows him what she has—she has taken everything, jewelry and money and the old couple’s bank book.
“We have to go,” she says. “We have to hurry.”
They tie up the unconscious old woman and lock her in the bedroom. They bury the old man in a shallow grave by the barn. With the first rays of light they are at the bus station, waiting.
EXT. EMERALD CITY—DAYBREAK
The three flying monkeys drag OZ outside, onto the street. Wizened WESTERNA follows. Behind her comes a figure he barely recognizes, a woman he had been looking for.
But she is changed.
She wears high-heeled, spiked boots, a short skirt, tank top, gold bracelets, paint. She’s had a boob-job, a nose-job, a tummy tuck and ear reduction and liposuction. She is almost luminous in the light. She looks at him for a long time without saying anything.
OZ:
Dorothy.
DOROTHY:
We had something good between us, Oz, but now it’s gone. The city’s too big and too wild and no two people can hope to stay together when there’s so much to see and do and be. We had something going for a while and it was good—it was very good. But I am not the same girl and you’re the same guy you’ve been, Oz. You’re a small-town boy with a small-town mind and you’ll never make it big. Go back to Kansas, Oz. Go back to your garage and your bikes and your full-moon runs through empty fields. I’ve got a future, Oz, a bright and Technicolor future, and you’ve no part of it no more.
OZ:
Dorothy…
DOROTHY:
Forget it, Oz. It’s Emerald City.
She turns her back on him and, slowly, walks away, disappearing behind the doors of the club.
WESTERNA looks down at OZ with a look almost of compassion.
WESTERNA:
You’ll mend.
WESTERNA:
Young hearts heal quickly.
She nods to her monkeys and they swiftly untie OZ.
WESTERNA:
But don’t ever come back.
WESTERNA turns to leave, her monkeys following. OZ stares after her, making no move to get up.
WESTERNA:
Don’t come looking for the woman behind the screen.
As the sun rises over the sleeping town the bus pulls to a stop at the station. It picks up two passengers.
As it drives away Oz look through the window, at the small town receding behind them in the distance. But Dorothy doesn’t look back: she looks ahead.
Later, she holds him tight. Her smile is dazzling. “We’re going to the city!” she says, almost breathless. “It’s going to be so wonderful, Oz, so—so glorious!”
She seems delighted with the word. The world. He smiles. They kiss. Ahead of them the yellow brick road stretches, like a promise, into infinity.
SEVEN YEAR ITCH
by Leah R. Cutter
Mama first put me in a cage when I was seven. I tried to get away, yanking and pulling on Mama’s hand, yelling how I didn’t wanna be going in there, how I’d be a good boy now. I stopped walking up the dirt path toward dark cave and the wooden bars, sitting back on my butt, but Mama dragged me forward, throwing me into the cage so hard I hit the back wall.
“Mama, why you doing this?” I kept asking as she put the biggest lock I’d ever seen through the loop in the door.
I expected a list of all the things I’d done wrong, like she did when she beat me. All I got was a glare and, “You’ll see.”
Truth was, that probably would have scared me into being good, at least for a while, if I’d had a chance.
Mama left me then, locked in a hollowed out cave on top of Zeke’s hill. I cried and cried, until my head hurt worse than that time Dwight hit me with a bat. I wiped off the tears and snot with my sleeve, then had a look around.
It wasn’t much of a cage, not fancy like with metal bars. It smelled of clean dirt, and was cooler than the hot August afternoon sunshine that I’d been playing in. I was pretty sure Pappy had made it: first dug out the hilltop, stolen the wooden slats from a hardware store or a neighbor, then pounded them deep into the ground. I got a splinter when I grabbed one and shook it. It weren’t going nowhere, and neither was I.
Mama had left me a loaf of Wonder bread, a jar of peanut butter, some apples and a jug of water. She’d also left me the old pot Grandpa had used to piss in when he’d gotten too old to get up on his own. Under it, I couldn’t believe that she’d also stashed two comic books. She didn’t approve of that “make-believe shit” as she called it. I’d already read them, of course, standing in the air conditioning of the Big K, but it was still something.
Time crawled. I ate and read and slept but Mama didn’t return, didn’t let me know how long I was being punished for. It was a strange punishment, here alone, with treats I didn’t normally get. I didn’t rightly know what she wanted.
I spent the rest of that long summer afternoon calling out to her, certain she was waiting just outside. I confessed to everything I’d ever done, whether she already knew or not, like letting Farmer Gray’s horses out of pasture and stealing candy bars from Bobby Holls’ lunch. I cried and said I was sorry and begged to please go home now.
My voice grew hoarse as I talked, deeper and gravelly, like Curly the janitor at school who was bald cause he had throat cancer. My hands started hurting and the ache spread to my arms and chest, like I’d taken a bad fall, head first, off Dwight’s bike.
“I’m sick Mama!” I cried. I shivered and couldn’t get warm one minute, then had to take my shirt off cause I’d sweat through it.
I don’t rightly recall what happened next. I think I dreamed, feverishly, ‘cause I saw my boy’s hands grow into a man’s, with strange dark hair, even on the knuckles. I scratched myself with the long yellowed nails, longer than the old hippy’s who lived in Evan’s Woods.