You Can't Go Home Again

You Can't Go Home Again

by Shanna Germain

Germain

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You Can't Go Home Again

You Can't Go Home Again Shanna Germain

Copyright 2008 by Shanna Germain. All rights reserved. No part of this story may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author. (Author’s note: If you want to use some of this story, please just email me at shanna.germain @ gmail.com and ask first. I won’t bite. I promise.)

Please note: If you are reading this story and you didn’t purchase it (or receive it as a gift from someone who purchased it), then please know that the author hasn’t been paid for this copy of her story. She works very, very hard to bring you the best fiction possible while also putting food on her table, so please… if you know this is a pirated version, take a few minutes to kick her a few bones at her website, http://mindfuckfiction.wordpress.com.

If you bought this story of your own free will, with your own (or your sweetie’s or your parent’s or even your enemy’s hard-earned money), then she thanks you a million times. And will even offer her firstborn to you. Just send her your snail mail address, and she’ll stuff it in a box and send it your way. Official rules: Offer becomes null and void if said author never has a firstborn. Offer not interchangeable with puppies, kittens or goldfish. Offer has not monetary value.

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T

he Emerald City isn’t emerald anymore. It’s black as apple-bark. DeDe doesn’t want anything to do with the place—too many creatures skittering at the near-

blind corners of her memory’s eyes—but what’s done is done, and what’s paid to get done doesn’t get paid until she’s done. So, here she is. And here is her gun, brought with her from the other big city. And here at her side is the big and brindled, half-Rottweiler dog pulling on a black collar studded with silver. His tongue lolls out like a big, pink eraser, and he’s drooling badly. She is careful to keep her legs away from the long clear strings of saliva that drip from his mouth. The dog ducks his head to sniff at something caught between the blackened bricks of a passing building and DeDe gives his collar a sharp yank. He growls but not at her. Not really. “Come on, Rot. Almost done and then we can go home.” As though he too has just been reminded of his purpose, he exhales a sniff of breath through his nose and then takes the lead, loping as far ahead of her as the leather leash will let him. She follows. It’s been a long time since she’s been here, but her feet remember the way, it seems, even if her eyes don’t. Her silver high heels clatter over the bracken cobblestones, and the thin silver straps cut into her feet. There’s a blister beginning to form on her baby toe—she can feel it rubbing with every step—and she nearly twisted an ankle on one of the yellow bricks on her way here. Crappy construction on that road to begin with, she thinks, and shitty in the way of upkeep ever since.

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“You’d better make this worth my while, you prick,” DeDe mutters, looking briefly skyward, her lips overly pinkened with cheap lipstick and by her habit of constantly chewing on them. Rot barely looks at her when she talks. If she’s not giving him food or a command, he hardly seems to care what’s coming out of her mouth. No one else looks at her either. She’s just another dirty whore in a city full of dirt and whores. Even her shoes are scuffed enough that they don’t shine the way they used to. She keeps her gun-hand to the walls, her hip to the bricks, and tugs her short skirt down over her thighs with the hand that holds Rot’s leash. Most of the people going by don’t lift their heads or their eyes as they pass. No one, she notices, wears the spectacles anymore either. And why would they? The city’s hardly going to blind anyone these days. So everyone just trods along, collars up, hands tucked deep in pockets like if they just push a little harder into the fabric they might find something shiny. DeDe thinks people, for the most part, are pretty fucking stupid that way. Never taking what they want. Always waiting around, as if someone’s going to step out of the shadows and give them their heart’s desire. Just for the asking. Fuck asking. She’d rather take. They round the corner, Rot still leading the way as though he knows where he’s going even though DeDe knows he doesn’t. The Emerald Castle isn’t emerald anymore either. It’s a big, squat black building that towers over the city like a hunched, shadowed creature ready to pounce. “You fucker,” DeDe breathes, looking at it. She doesn’t even know why she says that, or whether she means the castle, or the man inside, or even something or someone else, from long ago. Her heads swirls so that she has to catch her breath and swallow down a bit of bile that rises. She nearly chokes on it. Her pulse thins, takes wing at the side of her neck; she can feel it thumping there,

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following the path of her vein. She takes a single, stumbling step and her heel catches on the edge of a grate. “Fucking shit,” she says. Louder than she means to. She is all fuck these days, it seems. Breathe, DeDe, she thinks. This is hardly the worst thing you’ve done. She is almost done. Almost done. One more. And that thought gives her the breath she needs to stand up straight in her high heels, to make her head land back on her shoulders. She tucks the gun into the tight waistband of her skirt, takes Rot’s leash with both hands. Soon, she’ll be able to take these shoes off. She’ll buy new shoes. Something comfortable and old-maidish, something black or brown. Fuck, she’ll be able to go barefoot for the rest of her life if she wants. “I say barefoot, Rot,” she says. “What do you say?” But Rot doesn’t answer. He’s looking at the castle, strings of drool slobbering off his teeth, whining inside the catch of his collar, his tail thumping against her leg. DeDe has to agree. “You’re right. Let’s get this over with,” she says. “Then we can go home.”

**

What do you do if you’re a girl who’s been to Oz and back? Who talks of talking lions and flying monkeys and killing women with buckets of water? You tell the story over and over to Uncle Henry and Aunt Em and anyone else who will listen. And they tolerate you until they can’t anymore and then they find a “home” for Toto, who’s never really been the same since that cyclone, and they send you somewhere “for your own safety.” A somewhere full of electric shocks and fistfuls of pills and orderlies with straw-cut hands who like cute little girls in braids a bit too much. “Come on, honey, tell

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me again what those mean monkeys did to you. Did they bite your skin, your soft little boobies? Did they do this? Oh, yes, I believe you. Oh, yes.” At some point while you’re there, Uncle Henry dies. It comes to your knowledge that if Aunt Em dies, you can go free. And you start wishing for that, but only in the darkest places of your heart, where you’re allowed to want such evil things. When that doesn’t happen, you stop taking your pretty pills and you cut off your hair and make a noose of your blue and white skirt. Someone small once told you, “You have white in your frock, and only witches and sorceresses wear white,” but you can’t remember who that was now, and the noose doesn’t do its job anyway. It just leaves you gasping and lonely and naked.

**

The Castle is farther away than it looks, and by the time DeDe and Rot reach the gates the blister has rubbed itself into oblivion and restarted again, a soft squishy mass of throbbing pain. The guard at the front door is dressed in a uniform that was once emerald, but is now, like everything else, mostly black and brown. A strip of pale green rides up one side of his pants like moss marking the way north. DeDe cocks her hip in front of him, letting one long leg slide in front of the other. “I’m here to see the Wizard,” she says. The guard barely looks at her legs, and DeDe cocks her hip higher, pointing her foot inside its high-heeled shoe even though the pain makes her grit her teeth. Everyone looks at her legs eventually. “He doesn’t see just anyone,” the guard says.

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“He’ll see me.” Saying it, DeDe feels suddenly like something out of a bad movie, the old black and white ones she saw on TV in the sanatorium. She knows how she looks: battered and beat, godless, with dog and gun. She should have scaled the wall instead. But it’s too late now. “I doubt it,” the guard says. Now his brown eyes do travel the length of her leg, but not in the way she’d hoped. Fuck you, she thinks, yet again. She suddenly longs for the old guards, the ones who made her wipe her feet on the mat and who politely asked her to sit. She also suddenly longs to punch him in the face until his brown-yellow teeth clatter onto the dark floor around him. Beside her, Rot whines and strains toward the guard with his tongue hanging out. She yanks him back hard enough to make him choke and wheeze. Dumb fool, she thinks about the dog. Dumb friendly fool will lick anybody. “Listen,” she says, and she shifts her body so that she’s no longer all legs, but more childlike, almost innocent. “I know he wants to see me. Just tell him…” and then she leans to the guard and whispers the rest in his ear.

**

If you’re a girl who’s been to Oz and back, and then went to a different kind of Oz, only scarier and they called it the State Sanitarium, you will be let out at eighteen. Freed. For what, you wonder? Aunt Em’s lost her memory anyway, and Toto is long-dead and you’ve got nothing more than a history of psychosis and a lack of job skills and a rather apparent temper. You’ve heard New York called the Big Apple, and you think it will be as red as Emerald City was green.

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It is, it’s as red, but a different kind of red. Rusty water on the streets and the crimson mini dresses and the way blood drips like rubies down your face and feet. You learn to say, “Are you a good man?” before you get in the car, which sometimes works and sometimes does not. And you sometimes hear yourself saying, “You can come with me,” in a way that sounds familiar and pulls at something buried deep in your chest.

**

The chick who searches DeDe outside the Throne Room is hot, in that girl-in-uniform kind of way. Blonde hair — roots just showing enough to add to the dirty — pulled up in a ponytail that teeters between severe and titillating. In another instance, DeDe would have tried to take her home and fuck her. Maybe even come, the way she sometimes could with rough girls, girls who wore golden necklaces around their necks and hissed between their breath when they pinched their long nails over her nipples, girls who promised to harness her and starve her. But DeDe has a job to do, and she means to do it. She’s this close. “Got any liquids, gels or other fluids to declare?” the chick asks. DeDe shakes her head. When the chick kneels to run her hands over DeDe’s shoes, DeDe shudders at some memory she can’t recall. When the chick pats down DeDe’s calves and knees and the bottoms of her thighs, DeDe spreads her legs. She can’t help it. She imagines the chick’s fingers sliding between her thighs, growing wet. Next to her, Rot whines softly and licks his lips and DeDe focuses, shushing him with a breath. She needs him to behave.

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The chick pats her way down DeDe’s stomach and the curves of her hips. Her fingers find the gun, and tap the butt of it. “You can’t keep the gun.” “Guns can’t kill him,” DeDe says. “We both know it.” The chick stands, then slides the gun out of DeDe’s skirt, aims at a small dirt spot on the wall and pulls the trigger. The stream of water hits it with surprising accuracy. “No,” the chick says, “Not even this one can. Nice try though.” She sets the gun behind her out of DeDe’s reach. DeDe feels a momentary sense of loss; she’s had the gun with her since the beginning of this trip, although the truth is it’s a ploy. She never planned to use it. “You can’t go in,” the chick says. “The dog either.” DeDe leans forward, laying her lips against the other girl’s hard-lined mouth, the dark lipstick. The tip of her tongue cracks the space between her lips, explores her mouth. The earlier desire DeDe felt for the chick is all gone now, but she pushes forward. This is how she gets what she wants. It’s how she’s always gotten when she wants. What she thinks she wants. DeDe pulls back, and the chick eyes her for a long moment. “He’s a good man,” the chick says, but they both know she doesn’t mean it. The girl licks her lips, looks between DeDe and Rot. “I shouldn’t let you in,” she says. “I know,” DeDe says.

**

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When you’re a girl who escaped from two Ozes, and whose body no longer sells, what then? You return to where you started. The streets are always in need of shadows with teeth and claws. You don’t need a cyclone and a house to kill anymore. Your weapons are more subtle. A pretty face and fast fists. The silver and ruby sheen of a six-inch knife. A well placed, sharpened heel along an artery. And when some guy who used to be a wizard, but is now just some rich guy who wants his things back, when he comes to you and promises you some kind of forgetfulness, some kind of peace, plus a cool million, to knock off some creatures that you can barely remember anyway, to bring him back three things, like some prince in an ancient fairy tale, you don’t even ask where you need to sign. You just sit and watch while he calls a man who used to know a man with a hot air balloon. There are no magical caps this time, he tells you. And don’t you know it. You use part of his deposit making the weapons you need. You take the dog and your courage and your brain. The rest you can pick up along the way. And when you get back, you’re going to buy a house in the country. A house with land and a root cellar. And you’re going to buy a new pair of shoes. Scratch that, six new pairs of shoes.

**

The Throne Room isn’t emerald anymore either. It’s metallic, silver and grey. Space-age, like the kitchens she’s only seen in pictures for rich people.

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The Tin Man looks the same. Of course he does. Tin doesn’t age, especially not when it’s well taken care of. He’s made some minor adjustments. New materials, new metal. Some kind of technology that softens his face some, makes it more human. DeDe unconsciously touches her own face, the deep wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, the knife scar at the corner of her mouth. There’s a chipped tooth at the back of her palate—you can’t see it when she smiles, but she can feel it all the time, and she feels it now with her tongue, tracing it. “You should have told me you were coming!” the Tin Man says in that regal way that regal people have, and his mouth almost looks like a smile. He steps closer. His arms are out and she can see his big red heart right in the middle of his chest. Beat-beat-beat-beat. “I’ve missed you! I would have made a party.” “Don’t touch me,” she says before she thinks. It’s something she’s wanted to say for a long time, she realizes, to a lot of people. The tone of her voice, or maybe it’s the soft whine from the dog, stops him. His arms lower slowly to his side, his head tilts. She takes a moment to marvel at how human he seems now, his movements fluid and well-jointed. Her own movement, a single step back is suddenly jerky and stiff. Her knee won’t bend, her foot won’t move to settle back on the floor behind her. It’s the shoes, she thinks, the fucking shoes. The Tin Man is looking at her. His heart is in his eyes. It’s all she can see. Her ears are filled with the thum-thum-thum of his heart inside all that metal. How big is it now, she wonders. How much he’s tried to do for this city. Rot’s low whine rises and falls as he strains against the collar, tongue out, his tail thump-thumping, and she twists her hand tighter around the leash. “Don’t make this hard,” she says to the Tin Man. “Don’t fight it.”

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But she can see he’s going to do something stupid. Something drastic. It’s in those heart-filled eyes, in that almost-human movement of his arms, as though he means to hug her. “Don’t,” she says again. The others had been so easy, she thinks. Sure, the scarecrow had, as the rumors foretold, gotten smarter and smarter over the years. Smarter, and paranoid. Most of his brains went to developing a fire-proof coating for his straw body, building elaborate security systems. She’d planted a fast-acting mold in his body, let it eat away at the straw until there was nothing left of him but a few stalks and a hat. The lion wasn’t cowardly anymore, but he’d grown arrogant in his bravery, fierce, but lazy. Lolling about on his back, letting any creature rub his belly. Even a creature with poison in its claws. DeDe had stuck around to watch him foam and fester. It was the most she could do.

**

When you’re no longer a child, of Oz or Oz or anywhere else, what do you do with your heart? You put the little red thing in a wicker basket like a puppy and you sell pieces of it off to the highest bidder. And when there is no more heart left, you sell off the memories of it. And when there are no more memories, you make heart-shaped shadow puppets with your fists and you sell off the show. And when even those are gone, you pretend that hollow spot in your chest is just the way you were made.

**

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Rot thumps his tail against her leg. He strains at his leash. The Tin Man barely gives the dog a second glance. His eyes are all for her. “Dorothy,” the Tin Man says, his voice still tinny but somehow soft too, and she sees the red screen of anger across her vision. “It’s DeDe now,” she says. “Dorothy’s been dead a long time.” “No,” the Tin Man says. “You’ll always be Dorothy to me. Always. Don’t you remember how you saved me, gave me a heart?” He makes a move toward the beating thing inside his chest. Her fingers harden on the leash. Rot pants and whines. And then she opens her fingers, all at once, and lets the leash go. The dog leaps forward, tongue out, tail wagging. The Tin Man looks momentarily confused, and then Rot licks the Tin Man’s knee, pink against metal. Then his whole leg. Drooling saliva everywhere. In seconds, the Tin Man’s knee begins to blister and dissolve, hissing steam. “What?” the Tin Man wants to know. “Acid. In his saliva,” DeDe Says. “Took me forever to get it right.” As soon as she says it, DeDe shivers and closes her mouth hard against any more words. Almost done, she tells herself. Had a job to do. Almost done. The Tin Man’s beating at the dog with his almost human hands, but to Rot, that must seem like love, DeDe thinks, because he doesn’t stop. “Dorothy, no. No,” the Tin Man says. And then his knee is gone, and he’s buckling to the ground, on his knees. Rot’s licking his face, dissolving the metal at the corners of his eye, along the

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joints of his jaw. And she’s glad, so glad, because he’s finally being quiet and she doesn’t have to hear some other girl’s name coming from his mouth. The Tin Man is disappearing under the continual licks of the dog. She watches him go, an odd shudder of memory sliding through her, something about melting, then closes her eyes. When she opens them, there is nothing left on the floor but a dully beating heart. Red as blood, so much smaller than her fist. Rot noses at it. She shoos the dog out of the way with a quiet command, then bends down and picks up the heart. It is tiny and it beats inside her palm like a wild creature. She drops the heart in the pocket of her skirt, which bulges now against her hip, weighed down with the three things she’s come collect. “Good dog,” she says to Rot. He sits up, looking at DeDe for once as she speaks. “Good dog,” she says again, just to hear herself say it. And then she bends over and takes off her shoes, one at a time, until she’s standing barefoot on the floor. She picks the old, dirty shoes up by the straps, letting them swing from her fingers before she drops them in the middle of what used to be the Tin Man. They hit the stone floor with a clatter that makes her smile, and she turns to the door, pushing it open with two fingers. Her bare feet hardly make a sound as she slips out the door, into the waiting arms of the chick with her gun. She feels bad about lying to the dog. He’s not going to go home after this. None of them are.

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You Can't Go Home Again

with Shanna Germain

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+,--.%!'/-0! Q&A with Shanna Germain

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Q: This story uses the original characters of Oz but turns them on their head. Where did the idea come from to give the characters such a hard edge? S: I knew I wanted to write about Dorothy, to revisit her as an adult. At first, I thought I'd look at her when she was as old as the Wizard was when she first met him. And then I got thinking about whether Dorothy would actually live that long, which gave me a place to explore. I thought: what would life be like for a girl who came back from a 'lost world,' and who told everyone about it, as she seemed

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wont to do. This is one of the many 'future Dorothys' -- although I'm sure that in other worlds, she turns out to be the sweet, inquisitive girl she always was, in my world, she carries a rather hard edge.

Q: Where did your image for Oz come from? And what other elements of the original book did you use? S: Actually, the first line of the story came to me before I had anything else. I was thinking of the apple trees in the movie, and how there's that story of one of the stage crew members dying by hanging himself from one of them (which, supposedly, you can see in the movie). I wanted the city to be like that, dark and dirty, sort of alive, with creaky corners and hidden angles. The rest of the images came from the original book--I went back and reread it, using his descriptions of the guards at the gate and of the wizard's room, as well as the green spectacles and the ending, in which each of the party gets his own 'kingdom' to rule. There are a lot of elements in the book that didn't make it into the movie, and I wanted to pay homage to those creatures and creations.

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MindFuck Fiction Blowing Your Body & Mind, Every Time http://mindfuckfiction.blogspot.com

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