Wicked Games

5. (Follow The) Yellow Brick Road

 

                            5. (FOLLOW THE) YELLOW BRICK ROAD

There came a time in my childhood when I fell in love with the Wizard of Oz. Needless to say, there were plenty of reasons for why I fell so hard and fast for Dorothy and the gang. Maybe it was the fact that it was the first thing we watched - or did - on the Monday morning that I started St Mary’s in Manchester. Sent there after dad died, I felt a stronger connection with that movie and those characters than any others I had stumbled upon before – or even since then.

I was Dorothy; a little girl, lost, finding her way home. The tale captured me. It took me everything in me not to bawl in front of the whole class. But that day, it gave me hope – that I too, like Dorothy, would find my way home – eventually. Maybe it was by following some yellow brick road or just by clapping my ruby sandals together. It was also that just like Dorothy, I had friends who would help me get there. Maybe Jason was as brave as the lion, maybe Martha was my tin man and just maybe Blake was the straw man.  Naturally, Michelle was the wicked witch and she would get her share of revenge later served cold as sick.

 So, that Monday afternoon, I went home with a lifeline – the firm conviction that, come rain or shine, I’d be getting back home. I was going to be with my daddy again and our ‘family’ would live happily ever after. Looking back at how much I wanted it all to be a nightmare, how much I yearned to wake up in my daddy’s arms again, brought up a little bile. I should have known my mind couldn’t have conjured up such an excruciatingly painful experience for me to suffer through – there had been so many times when it had gotten too much to bear and surely I would have been forced awake.

* * * 

It had probably been a good half an hour that I’d been walking outside with no sense of direction or idea where I was going. The icy breeze biting at my skin offered me no escape from what I was trying to save myself from, each consecutively slashing at me. I suppose, I couldn’t have predicted a painless return to the life I had been forcibly removed from not so long ago.

The skin I had unwittingly left uncovered was a storm of goose bumps and upright hair, my arms the most vulnerable to the glacial winds so in an admittedly fruitless attempt at generating some body heat, I wrapped them around myself, running my hands up and down them.

Not the first time caving in and walking back into that toasty house crossed my mind, I shrugged those ideas off, allowing the image of Jason, Emilie and the devil-spawn to the fore-front of my mind.

Sure enough, my pride overrode any other options because I knew that the cold I was able to handle. Them, however? Not so much.

The unsympathetic March air raked through my hair, my breathe growing increasingly shallow prompting me to decide that I should find a place to rest.

It was strange, though; that kind of quiet didn’t belong in a city anywhere. With nothing but the street lamps guiding me, my eyes wandered to the imposing buildings unknowingly caging me here. If nothing else, living in an area scattered with mansions allowed me to roam the streets under the cloak of darkness limitlessly. The Stepford wives would be in bed before anything scandalous appeared on the telly whilst the husbands scarpered from their mistresses to greet their wives with a kiss on the cheek and play happy families.