Buildy Bob assumes a cone position atop the ice cream truck. “You don’t belong the f-ck here, I’m sensing.”
“No,” she stated plainly. BB was about the only character here she trusted. Crude and rude, true, but that showed his true colors, rainbow exposed. Diversity. No white out.
“Where’re you from, then, Pinhead?” He’d been calling her Pinhead ever since he saw diminutive Mary PipPIN land on her HEAD from the perspective of his roaming camera eye. Most, maybe all of the other characters in this here Land o’ Dreams don’t roam like that; stay fixed in their position inside their head and body. Not BB. He wanted to know the bigger perspective.
“I landed in a balloon,” she decided to say. “From Kansas,” she almost followed, but then remembered Omaha was actually in Oklahoma Nebraska. Or was it? “Nebraska I’m from,” she finalized. “World’s Fair.” State fair she meant there but she let the stated mistake stand. She should have thought things through sooner, maybe written down her lines beforehand. At least she had the (built in) black hair for the ears. And where were her ears? There.
“Oh we’ll get Oz don’t you worry,” he said a little later about another potential assimilation, using “we” in an ironic sense. Why do they put up with him? she wondered again. Allow a breathing, walking Achilles Heel right in their midst?
“It’s too early,” she corrected. “The (Baum) books are copyright free. Plumly is different.”
“Don’t start with me about *Ruth*.” And where *was* Ruth, BB thought bitterly, looking around as if she could appear magically in their immediate vicinity. And perhaps she could. This was a Magic Kingdom after all; anything goes, as long as you worship the White. “Have you seen Willy, yet?” he then asked, thinking of the only other interesting *deviation* from this parade of madness. “Riding a steamboat. But I think he’s changed his name to Kelly to protect the innocent and all. Which means him — primarily. And me I suppose. He’s a pretty decent fellow, but scared and nervous, as he should be. They can’t fully assimilate him because he represents some kind of *ur* character, a primordial man-mouse of some sort. Don’t ask me how to explain all the details of it. It’s just they can’t fully *touch* him. He remains both black and white. Pansy knows.”
Pansy, thought Alysha here. I haven’t heard that name for a long long time. Not since childhood.
(to be continued)
Sunklands 