“I’m on an acid trip,” I murmur, stumbling back and putting myself against the wall under the coat rack, the one item in this whole house that seems to have stayed where it was put. My breath comes in violent panting heaves as I look around for my aunt. “Aunt Em!” I call out, but there’s no reply.
At least, not from inside the house.
“Welcome, most noble Sorceress,” a voice calls blandly from just beyond the door. I push up off the wall, head spinning, and peer out into the endless sunshine to find a group of people approaching the house. There’s a man leading them, slow-clapping in dramatic fashion as he rolls his lavender eyes at me. “Welcome to the land of the Munchkins.”
The … fucking what?
I blink at him in shock as my eyes stray from his admittedly handsome face and down to the group surrounding him. They’re all men, all short, about the same size as my little sister was before she died. Four and a half feet tall, at most.
Oh, and they all have gossamer fucking wings on their backs. My eyes scan across the crowd, each of them dressed in blue hats with little bells that tinkle when they move.
This isn’t fucking happening to me, I think, realizing that this could all very well be a delusion brought on by the mug that smashed me upside the head.
The man in front, the only one who’s not significantly shorter than me—he’s taller, actually—yawns and reaches up to adjust the white witch hat on his head.
“We’re so very grateful to you”—just to be clear, he doesn’t sound grateful in the least, more like bored out of his mind—”for having killed the Wicked Witch of the East, and for setting our people free from bondage, yada, yada, yada, so on and so forth.”
“Uh, say what?” I ask, blinking back at him in shock. “I haven’t killed anyone.”
“Your house did anyway,” he replies, gesturing at me with pale skin that glints with a hint of gold in the sunshine, like he’s covered in glitter or something. “And that’s the same damn thing. Don’t believe me? Look for yourself.” He nods in the direction of the house, and even though I’m pretty sure I’m hallucinating things, I step outside and glance over to find a pair of legs sticking out from beneath the gray-painted walls of Aunt Em’s cottage.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” I clamp both hands over my mouth as I stare at the mangled legs, the shimmer of white bone, and the wash of blood staining the green grass beneath them. “What the fuck am I supposed to do about that?!”
“Well, there’s nothing to be done. Ding dong, the bitch is dead.” The man pauses beside me, smelling like my favorite body spray from Victoria’s Secret, this coconut and gardenia mix called Bronzed Coconut. Swear to god, that freaks me out almost as much as the corpse.
Sliding away from door, I put my back to the wall to keep some distance between myself and the weird little fae men as I sidle along toward the legs protruding from underneath my goddamn house. It’s a long shot, but I should at least see if the person is still alive, right?
As I get a little closer though, I can already tell there’s about as much chance of this person still being alive as there is that I’m not hallucinating. As in, none at all. None.
“Who … who is this?” I whisper, choking on bile as the sharp smell of copper stings my nostrils. I hate the smell of blood. Hate it. It reminds me that we’re all mortal, that my family was mortal, that they’re no longer here.
Although, to be fair, when they died, there wasn’t any blood at all, just cold water and an endless darkness spiraling in.
“Like I said, the Wicked Witch of the East,” the man with the lavender eyes repeats, looking like he’d very much enjoy slapping some sense into me. That is, if he could bother working up the energy to do so in the first place. “Are you deaf or something? She held the Munchkins in bondage for years, made them her slaves day and night. They’re free now. It’s a blessing to see her bloodied corpse.” He moves forward and kicks one of the sparkly silver shoes on the dead person’s feet.
“The … Munchkins?” I ask, turning my wide-eyed gaze back to the group of winged men. They’ve all got a bluish tint to their skins, from a pale robin’s egg blue to a navy and everything in between. I swallow hard and turn back to the tall man, finding his narrowed eyes watching me with undisguised irritation.
“The people who live in this land—obviously.”
“Are you a Munchkin?” I ask, still trying to figure out why my brain is hallucinating some fucked-up version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Heh. I saw Wicked at the theater once and liked it, so maybe that’s what this is? Some delusion brought on by head trauma.
