Darling Pixley Pixy,
I tried to leave you but when I went out the front door it just became a door. I looked back. I realized all the answers I wanted were here — there — after all, kind of like Dorothy and her Kansas. So I gave up Oz; went back through the door. Laid down and went to sleep for a bit. Woke up and came downstairs to eat breakfast-dinner with the stern but still kindly aunt and the kind of stern but kind of not uncle — old fashioned they were. Asked them how I got here (eventually). They said:
“You landed here.”
I said, “Whaat?”
“In a beam of white light,” they further confessed. “You are not…”
“… from this world,” the other completed for the first, gams for gams (as we say).
I sat there, stunned obviously.
“Your eyes,” they continued. “That was the giveaway. That led to the others.”
“The… *others*?”
“The other… phenomena,” spoke the uncle, differentiating himself from my aunt in tone and volume. He spoke quite a bit after that. The skin tone pink was brought up early (and loudly) in the spiel. Then the tattoo, which he wrongly called “demon”. It was “demo”. They assumed I had scrubbed off the N somehow to cover this up and then flipped my hair down over the space along with the damaged eye. This also made me a heathen in their eyes. But somehow they still managed to love me. Deeply. Alien influence, I gathered from them, some kind of et sorcery.
“The cards,” Aunt Mina then prompted Uncle Taum.
“Ah yes,” he started again, but found his mouth was tired from talking. “You tell, dear.” He worked his jaw up and down, trying to get the soreness out for the next round of words. Aunt Mina saw this. Started talking kind of for him but also kind of not. She had her own mind these days. Read up on the suffragettes thanks to Marty. Realized Muff was just a portmanteau for Mutt and Jeff, with Jett jettisoned in the process — in the name. Band on the run.
“Do you recall being on the run?” she then asked, “OTR as we like to call it?”
“Tell her about the bluebird,” spoke the uncle, able to insert that much at least.
“Cards first. Cardinals,” the aunt clarified.
(to be continued)
Sunklands 