Wits

An excerpt from Dear Luke, We Need to Talk. Darth, by John Moe.

Dear Glinda,

I am safely back home in Kansas now and wanted to take a moment to drop you a line. It’s funny: Kansas has kind of a reputation as a boring place. Flat, featureless, tedious. And it is those things. In many ways Kansas is awful. Everyone here is frankly pretty screwed up. People can only take so much Dust Bowl, you know? But I will say this for Kansas: at least there are no wicked witches trying to kill me here. Repeatedly. And cackling over the proposition because my imminent murder gives them such hysterically humorous joy.

Obviously, that was the challenge I faced in my recent trip to Oz: supernatural beings trying to kill me for actions that were in no way my fault. And Glinda, I will always remember what you told me about going home just before I transported back to Kansas. “You’ve always had the power, my dear,” you said. “You’ve had it all along.”

I think about that a lot now, Glinda, because it helps me crystallize my feelings for you. I hate you. I had the power to go home all along? From the point I put those slippers on my feet back in Munchkinland, I could have gone home? I could have avoided the death threats, the flying monkey attacks, the near-fatal narcotic overdose in the poppy fields (you know poppies are what they make heroin out of, right?), the imprisonment by the witch from which I escaped only as a result of pure luck? If I had just done that click-my-heels thing at the start, none of that would have happened.

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And as I recall, Glinda, you were RIGHT THERE in Munchkinlandand could have shared that important bit of information right there on the spot.

Fuck you, Glinda.

After you finally did tell me how easily I could have avoided all that mortal danger, Scarecrow even asked you why you didn’t tell me before. You said I wouldn’t have believed you. The hell I wouldn’t. I had already landed in a strange world, committed manslaughter, was surrounded by munchkins, and visited by witches. I would have believed literally anything at that moment. Or at least tried anything.

But no, you said, I had to find out for myself. Again: fuck you. And fuck you once more. Apparently “finding out for myself” means forming relationships with scarecrows and metal men who have come to life, as well as Bert Lahr in a lion suit. None of that—NONEOF THAT—is my idea of a good time. I’m fucking sixteen years old and wandering the woods with those creeps? What the fuck is wrong with you, Glinda?

Yeah, Kansas at its very dullest at least has some vague principles of honesty and decency.

All that being said, I confess I do hope to return to Oz one day. Not to visit my traveling companions, mind you; they scared me. I hope whatever Satanic witchcraft animated and anthropomorphized them will wear off and they will be dead or otherwise obliterated. No, I hope to return so that I can somehow find a way to burn down your whole horrible world. Good witches, bad witches, Munchkinland, Land of Oz, whatever other twisted villages and hamlets I come across, flying monkeys; the whole lot of it must be incinerated in the name of biblical justice.

That’s right: I’m a Kansas girl from early-20th century America. My religion is strong and my God is a wrathful and powerful one who doesn’t look kindly on “magic” and “witches.” It’s idolatry and it must be punished. I will lay waste to all of it and watch it burn.

I’m coming for you, Glinda. And so is Jesus. And so is pain.

Dorothy Motherfucking Gale

As seen on Wits: ‘Dorothy Should Not Go Back to Kansas’