Apart from wanting to boss around little people, I’ve a hankering for ruby red slippers. I mean, is it too much to ask for some Technicolor™ in my grey-scale life? But Dorothy Gale, she who brings kaleidoscopic hues to all she touches, has the goddamn slippers. After house-splatting my sister too. The unfairness of her justice-dodging sits awful sore. Me: one dead sibling; Dorothy G: a dance and a prance along a yellow brick road, and some dazzling footwear.
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I fashion my own slippers using scarlet glitter, glue, some spit and a helluva lot of spite. After a morning’s work I slide them on and check the mirror. My pretties.
Devil-dust flitters in my wake as I totter about town. I am punch-the-air bright and top-of-the-world awesome till...I stop...my mouth hanging salt-pig slack at the sight above me.
A rainbow.
A rainbow filling the sky with its oily iridescence. I swallow down bile, my mind vomiting up images of Dorothy skipping about with that raggedy dog, shabby lion, tinpot man and Mr Arsonist’s Dream.
I kick off the slippers and schlep home, melting with misery, wishing rainbows were black and white, knowing it was never about the slippers.
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