Holograms, I decided. It was all done with holograms. Then again, I had definitely felt the old woman’s wrinkly lips on my forehead when she’d kissed me. Could they be robots? Was it like that one HBO show, with the cowboys? The one I don’t watch? Because it looks stupid?

I looked down at the dog. “What do you think, Toto? Are you a robot?”

Toto barked. Of course, the robot theory couldn’t explain the old woman’s disappearing act, or that business with her hat turning into a chalkboard. Which left two possibilities, neither of them particularly appealing: some kind of drug-induced hallucination, or, I don’t know, the fucking Matrix.

My belly let out a growl. If the magical land of Oz was all in my head, then my stomach was definitely in on the con. Why didn’t I get that damned corn dog? I went back to the shack and rummaged through the cabinets to discover some bread and butter, which beat starving to death, at least. I ate some of it and fed some to the dog. Some nearby trees also had borne a variety of juicy and vaguely delicious-looking fruits, but I wasn’t about to take that risk. This place was already proving very different from the movie I’d watched over and over in my youth, and at this point I was about ninety percent sure that random dangling fruit would turn out to be some kind of trap.

I stuffed the rest of the bread into a basket along with my old sneakers—if I had to walk all the way to the City of Emeralds, I wasn’t about to do it without magical witch repellent, or whatever it was the shoes did in this story. They were surprisingly comfortable to walk in, too, although they did make an annoying sort of tinkling noise the moment they hit yellow brick.

But it’s not like that would get annoying at all, since it was only like a SEVEN-HUNDRED-MILLION-HOUR WALK BEFORE I EVEN GOT OUT OF MUNCHKINLAND.

They don’t tell you that in the movie. They just cut straight to the scene with the scarecrow. But I walked and walked and walked, and there were vast expanses of farmland, picturesque as balls, but no scarecrows. Every once in a while I’d pass a domed blue house, and the people inside would come out to stare. I’d be all like, “DO YOU HAVE LIKE A HORSE AND BUGGY OR SOMETHING, I NEED A GODDAMN RIDE,” but they’d just wave and bow a lot. Munchkins are super into bowing.

Seriously, though, that road went forever. Somewhere past the eight-hour mark my phone went dead from repeatedly checking the time, and I had a disturbing thought. I hadn’t started walking in the middle of a spirally Munchkin town center or anything.

Had I been going the wrong direction down the Yellow Brick Road this entire time?

The movie had made it seem like the whole trip through Oz was like a one-day thing, but apparently that was not the case. Now it was starting to get dark, and I hadn’t even stumbled across my first song-and-dance number.

As if on cue, fiddle music erupted from somewhere up the road. I hoped this meant I would finally find that goddamn scarecrow, but it turned out that a particularly wealthy Munchkin was throwing a party to celebrate my unintentional witch murder. His name was Boq, and he owned what was by far the largest tiny blue house I had seen so far. People were dancing and laughing, and at least five Munchkins were playing fiddles. He invited me to join the feast and spend the night.

A big table on the lawn was loaded with pastries and cakes and fruit and nuts and all kinds of amazing-looking food. All I had eaten all day was the bread, and the dog had actually eaten most of it. I was RAVENOUS.

I looked at the food, though, and the overeager Munchkins beckoning me to partake of it. Wasn’t there some deal with food in fairy tales? Like, if you eat the food you’re stuck there forever, or get turned into a goat or something? The Wizard of Oz movie obviously differed quite a bit from the book—for all I knew, that whole don’t-eat-magic-fairy-food thing came from the literature I was currently voyaging through.

Also, I had been walking all day, and the theory that this whole thing was some low-rent theater production had been shot to hell within the first couple of miles. I was either being subjected to an elaborate simulation generated by some combination of Star Trek technology and hallucinogens, or I had actually been transported to a magical land. Either way, there must be secret rules that governed all of this, and I wasn’t about to let some fairy lure me into a deadly trap just because I was—

“Oh my God, is that a meat pie?”

Fuck it. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure those things had some kind of enchantment on them, too, because I devoured like eight of them and I was still like, “WHERE DO YOU KEEP THE REST OF THE MEAT PIES?”

My Munchkin host just laughed. “You must be a great sorceress,” he said.

“What? Why?”

“Because you wear silver shoes and have killed the Wicked Witch,” he said. “Besides, you have white in your frock, and only witches and sorceresses wear white.”

I was wearing a black hoodie and jeans. “What are you even talking about?”

“Your attire,” Boq insisted. “It is kind of you to wear that. Blue is the color of the Munchkins, and white is the witch color. So we know you are a friendly witch.”

I flipped over the empty silver pie tray and checked myself out in its gleaming surface. Sure enough, staring back at me was a cherubic-looking ten-year-old girl in a blue-and-white checkered dress. Judy Garland was actually around my age when she got the part in The Wizard of Oz, but evidently the real Dorothy was quite a bit younger. Also, her face was slathered in beef gravy.

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Munchkin dancing and fiddle music actually get old pretty quick, so I was ready to retire as soon as the meat-sleepies kicked in. Boq showed me to a cozy room with a bed that was only about a foot too short for me. The mattress was soft, though, and I was exhausted. I slept soundly until morning, with Toto curled up on a little blue rug beside me.

At breakfast I watched a tiny Munchkin baby play with Toto—he was quite the curiosity, since I guess they don’t have dogs in Oz. I was pretty sure that kid was going to get herself bitten, too, because she kept yanking the dog’s tail, but Toto seemed to have far more patience with this whole thing than I did.

“So, like, how far is the Emerald City?” I asked.

“I do not know,” Boq answered gravely, “for I have never been there. It is better for people to keep away from Oz, unless they have business with him. But it is a long way, and it will take you many days. The country here is rich and pleasant, but you must pass through rough and dangerous places before you reach the end of your journey.”

Awesome. At least he was able to confirm that I was headed in the right direction. Also, I think he was a little bit afraid of me, because he had apparently made his cooks stay up late baking meat pies. They filled my basket and sent me on my way.

Several miles later, I was resigning myself to another exhausting day of majestic countryside and slipper blisters, when I finally saw it. In a cornfield not far off the road, stuck up on a pole, was a scarecrow.

This wasn’t some pleasant-looking actor in a suit, though, with oddly charming burlap neck-fold makeup. This was, like, a real scarecrow, with a sack for a head that had been hastily painted with kind of a half-ass grimace to scare off birds. It was wearing worn-out blue Munchkin clothes complete with pointy hat, and stuffed with straw that left its entire body lumpy and misshapen.

I stared into its dead eyes. Was it possible that this was just a normal, un-enchanted scarecrow? “Uh, do you… speak?”

“Certainly,” answered the Scarecrow, in a surprisingly husky voice. “How do you do?”

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaagh. The overall effect was terrifying. “Fine,” I murmured. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH. “Uh, how do you do?”

“I’m not feeling well,” said the Scarecrow, his painted mouth curling into a wide smile. “For it is very tedious being perched up here night and day to scare away crows.”

“Yeah,” was all I managed to mutter over the sound of my own internal screaming. “Sucks.”

“Alas,” he said, “this pole is stuck up my back. If you will please take away the pole, I shall be greatly obliged to you.”

Okay Grimsbro, I thought, suck it up. Creepy or not, the Scarecrow was Dorothy’s dearest friend in Oz, and obviously a vital plot point in this whole story. I reached up with both arms and lifted him off the pole—he actually turned out to be quite light. He also wiggled while I set him down. Yeeeeeeeewwww.

“Thank you very much,” the Scarecrow said. “I feel like a new man!”

As off-putting as it was to watch his painted-on scarecrow face speaking and contorting into various expressions, seeing him gyrate and move and bow and walk around on his own was somehow even worse.

“Who are you?” asked the Scarecrow, stretching, scratching himself and yawning. “And where are you going?”

“Go ahead and call me Dorothy, I guess? I’m going to the Emerald City to ask the wizard to send me back to… oh, let’s just say Kansas.” I was hoping he would at least be able to tell me how much farther Oz was, but the Scarecrow had never even heard of it. The city or the wizard.

“I don’t know anything,” he said sadly. “You see, I am stuffed, so I have no brains at all.”

“Ugh. So you’re basically useless to me.”

His uncanny, painted eyes lit up. “Do you think,” he asked, “if I go to the Emerald City with you, that Oz would give me some brains?”

“Definitely,” I said. “Or… maybe? At the very least a half-assed diploma or something that sort of represents brains. Which is better than nothing.”

“That is true,” said the Scarecrow. “You see,” he continued confidentially, “I don’t mind my legs and arms and body being stuffed, because I cannot get hurt. If anyone treads on my toes or sticks a pin into me, it doesn’t matter, for I can’t feel it. But I do not want people to call me a fool, and if my head stays stuffed with straw instead of with brains, as yours is, how am I ever to know anything?”

I was fairly certain that getting him to join me was imperative to somehow finishing this hallucination or video game or whatever the hell it was. Also, something about the way this horrifying nightmare creature truly yearned for more was genuinely touching. “If you come with, me I’ll ask Oz to do everything he can for you,” I said.

“Thank you,” he answered gratefully. I managed to dodge his hug, but had to help him over the fence on the way back to the road.

Toto, for the record, was even more freaked out by this new addition to our party than I was. He kept growling, and stopping to launch into full-on barking fits.

“Don’t worry about the dog,” I said. “He hasn’t actually bitten anything yet.”

“Oh, I’m not afraid,” replied the Scarecrow. “He can’t hurt the straw. Do let me carry that basket for you. I shall not mind it, for I can’t get tired.”

Hmm. At least I wouldn’t have to carry my own pies. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he continued as he walked along. “There is only one thing in the world I am afraid of.”

I stopped in my tracks. “Oh. We’re about due for a Wicked Witch sighting, aren’t we?”

“No,” said the Scarecrow. “The only thing I’m afraid of is a lighted match.” He just stood there, staring at me.

Okay, that wasn’t ominous at all.

.