I’m not sure how long I was unconscious, but when I woke up I was laying on a grassy hill. I opened my eyes, and the sea of red flowers seemed to have been replaced with stubby brown ones.
Wait. Those weren’t flowers. I blinked the sleep out of my eyes, only to discover that I was entirely surrounded by mice. Small mice, big mice, mice in every shade of brown, as well as black and gray and white. Literally thousands of them, and each and every one was staring up at me patiently with a little piece of string in its mouth.
What the fuck did I miss while I was asleep?
From somewhere behind me, the Scarecrow spoke. “Permit me to introduce to you Her Majesty, the Queen.”
Was I supposed to be able to tell which one of these rodents was royalty? “Uh, it’s lovely to meet you… Your Majesty?” I muttered, just kind of to the assembled mouse crowd in general. One of them made a little curtsey. Upon further inspection, I decided that she did look reasonably dignified.
“So, does somebody want to explain to me what’s going on here?” I stood up carefully to avoid crushing the sea of rodents, and turned around to find the Scarecrow and Tin Woodsman standing next to the decapitated carcass of a big, yellow cat.
“Jesus!” That last part came as a bit of a surprise. “What the actual fuck?”
“I rescued Her Majesty from this ferocious wildcat,” the Woodsman said. Now I saw that his axe was thoroughly coated with cat blood. “I have no heart, you know, so I am careful to help all those who may need a friend, even if it happens to be only a mouse.”
“What about the cat? The cat didn’t need a friend?” The whole thing seemed awfully arbitrary. I mean, the Cowardly Lion was off in the woods eating things that were probably at least as sympathetic as these mice were, and certainly much larger. I had been trying to convince myself that maybe deer and some of the other animals in Oz weren’t sentient, and that the Lion was conscientious about which ones he made into dinner. But now I wasn’t so sure.
“The beast had two rows of ugly teeth, and its red eyes glowed like balls of fire,” the Scarecrow said. “Surely, it was a villain.”
Okay. I was just going to have to roll with this one. “So now the Mouse Queen is our friend, and we’re having a big mouse party. And the little pieces of string? What’s the deal with those?”
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“The Queen and her subjects have agreed to help us rescue the Cowardly Lion from the poppy field,” the Woodsman said. “He is too heavy for the Scarecrow and I to move alone, so at first I thought we’d have to abandon him forever…”
“Of course you did.”
“…but then the Scarecrow thought to build a truck from the trees by the riverside, and pull the Lion to safety by the combined strength of a thousand tiny mice.”
He gestured to the river, and next to it there was indeed a sturdy-looking cart, with wheels made from cross sections of a thick tree trunk. I remembered that it took the Woodsman all night to build a raft. How long had I been asleep?
“So, wait,” I said. “You had to decapitate a forty-pound housecat to rescue these guys. But they’re cool with carting around a full-sized lion?”
“I was concerned about this myself,” the Mouse Queen said. Oh, good. It talked. “But the funny tin man assured me that he was a coward, and that he would never hurt anyone who is your friend.”
He literally tried to maul us to death yesterday. I held my tongue. It seemed obvious to me that if the opium poppies knocked me out cold, they would certainly affect tiny rodents much more severely, and we’d quickly wind up with a sleeping lion AND like five thousand sleeping field mice. But my head was groggy, my back was sore, and I had an awful crick in my neck from sleeping on a goddamned hill.
“You know what? I’m just going to let this thing play out however it’s going to play out.”
The Scarecrow and Woodsman started fastening mice to the cart, using all the various strands of string that each mouse had between its teeth (I thought about asking where they’d gotten the string, but ultimately, who cared?). To my great surprise, it worked quite well. With the entire lot of them they were able to pull the cart easily, even with the Scarecrow and Woodsman riding on top of it (which, to be honest, I thought was kind of a dick move).
Fortunately, the Lion had almost made it to the edge of the poppies before passing out—I could see him from my spot on the hill. The mouse cart reached him quickly, and with a lot of grunting and groaning, the Woodsman and Scarecrow somehow managed to lift his huge, limp body up on top of it. At first, he proved too heavy for the mice to pull. But the Scarecrow and Woodsman helped push from behind, and they successfully hauled him out of the flowerbed and into fresh air before any of the mice succumbed to the opium haze.
It took an absurd amount of time to unfasten each little mouse from its tiny string harness, and to be honest the things kind of gave me the creeps, so I sat down with my back against the sleeping Lion and ate nuts while the others toiled away. It’s not like we were going anywhere until the big guy woke up, anyway.
Each mouse scampered away once it was free, and the Mouse Queen was the last one to leave.
“If ever you need us again,” she said, “come out into the field and call, and we shall hear you and come to your assistance. Goodbye!”
The Queen ran off, and I had to hold Toto tightly, because he started to chase her, and if I had learned one thing today it was that the Tin Woodsman would chop your fucking head off if you tried that shit. I hadn’t quite decided if this bloodthirsty streak had made him less attractive to me, or more.
The Scarecrow went on a fruit run, and the rest of us chilled out by the Lion, waiting for his poppy trance to wear off.