After Oz: There is No Place Like Home?

The Wizard did not look like a god when the curtain fell.

That was the first wrong thing.

Dora had been told all her life that the Wizard’s face was too bright to look at directly, that his voice came from above because mercy always descended, that the Emerald City stood because he stood inside it, seeing what ordinary people could not see and arranging what ordinary people could not survive without him arranging it. The school readers said this. The ration slips said this in smaller print. The loudspeakers said this every seventh morning when the district bells gave their green chime and the voice from the towers blessed the pumps before water came coughing through the pipes.

But when the curtain fell, the great voice did not thunder.

It stopped.

The lights behind the throne shuttered once, then died down to the color of tired glass. The painted smoke that had made the chamber seem larger than its walls drifted upward and thinned against the beams. The golden head on the dais kept moving for a moment after the voice left it, mouth opening and closing around nothing, teeth clicking quietly as the machine finished the motion it had been given before anyone had thought to tell it the lie was over.

Behind the curtain stood a man.

Not a god. Not even a monster.

A man in a green coat with one sleeve worn shiny at the elbow. A man whose hair had been arranged to look accidental. A man with ink on the side of his thumb and the pinched, listening face of someone who had spent years measuring which words made people kneel fastest.

He looked at Dora first.

Not at the Tin Man, though the guards had pushed him against the wall with rods at his joints.

Not at the Scarecrow, whose straw had been searched as if truth might be hidden in his stuffing. Not at the Lion, who had been made to crouch because the chamber ceiling had been built for spectacle and not for creatures with shoulders. He looked at Dora, because she had pulled the curtain.

The little dog at her feet growled once.

The Wizard lifted both hands.

No thunder came. No fire.

Only hands.

“Dora,” he said, and his voice had changed. It was smaller now, but not weaker. The throne voice had been made for the city. This one had been made for rooms.

The guards stepped nearer.

They were not cruel men. That was the second wrong thing.

One had a wedding band rubbed nearly flat from use. One had a loose button he kept pressing with his thumb. The youngest looked once at Dora’s shoes and then away, as though the shine hurt him. They did not sneer. They did not enjoy themselves. They adjusted their grips, waited for instruction, and breathed through their noses the way men breathe when they have been taught that steady hands are a form of obedience.

The Wizard saw her notice them.