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rayasoIdol Mini-Season 2024
Prompt 6: The path is made by walking
August 17, 2024
REVIVAL
“One more step,” Ray Hamilton, professional searcher, thought, “just one more step. One more goddamn step.”
How do you keep walking when every step hurts so much? He was too tired to think about it.
“Just one more #*%!ing step.”
He was ratcheting up the profanity, so at least that felt good. But he was getting closer - he could feel it.
“Why would anyone pay all that money just to find the Yellow Brick Road?” Ray thought, “And why was I stupid enough to take the assignment?”
It had all started when Lyman Baum, the great-grandson of Frank L. Baum, the author of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” had walked in to his office.
“You find lost things?” Lyman had asked.
“That’s what it says on the door.”
“Anything?” Lyman had asked.
“If the price is right and it’s not illegal,” Ray had replied. “Illegal costs more. A lot more.”
“Money’s no object,” Lyman had replied. “I just need someone with the guts to carry this through.”
Lyman had written a number on a piece of paper, a very large number, and then he had pushed it over to Ray.
“For this much money,” Ray had replied, “you can have my guts and a kidney besides.”
“I want you to find the Yellow Brick Road,” Lyman had said, “and bring back at least three bricks. No bricks, no money.”
“I’ll tell you all I know about the Road in a few days,” he had added.
“I have an idiot for a client,” Ray had thought. “Still, a job is a job and I can earn a bucket of money. Time to pack.”
Ray had had a personal interest in taking the case. As a child, he had loved the Wizard of Oz books, even “Glinda of Oz.” Once, for Halloween, he had worn a Tin Woodsman costume made of boxes spray-painted gray. The assignment brought all that back to him.
It had turned out that all that Lyman knew was not much.
Three days later he had received a package from his client. It had contained a copy of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” a handwritten paper with “Directions” scrawled at the top and a bus ticket to Liberal, Kansas. Liberal had been Dorothy’s home when the tornado transported her to Oz. According to the directions, Ray had to go to Liberal, “catch a tornado, find Oz, and bring me the bricks.”
Liberal is a small town in southwest Kansas of 20,000 residents. Farming and oil are the main industries. It includes a small “Dorothy” museum in her old farmhouse and an annual Ozfest, which was in full swing when Ray had arrived. He had felt like he’d stepped into another world when he got off the bus.
“Never seen so much gingham and pigtails,” he had thought. “And there are Tinmen, Cowardly Lions, Scarecrows, and way too many flying monkeys.”
There was also a small, and obviously fake, Yellow Brick Road. Ray had been tempted to take a few of the bricks back and get paid for just trying. In retrospect, that had definitely been the better plan. But then Nature had intervened.
Ray had been face-first in an “Auntie Em Fried Chicken Lunch” with all the fixin’s when the town’s tornado siren had gone off.
He had seen the funnel forming just outside of town. Everyone had run away, except Ray. In a stupendous moment of delusional self-confidence, he had run toward the tornado.
The expected had happened, and he had been sucked up into the cloud. Round and round he had spun, along with a few cows, some old furniture, and a couple of land sharks, until he had lost consciousness.
When he awoke, he knew he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. But it sure didn’t look like Oz.
There was only one explanation.
“Too many sequels,” he thought. “Sucked the imagination out of the place.”
Long before Baum finished all fourteen Oz books, his imagination was as dry as Kansas dirt.
Instead of the vibrant colors he had loved as a child, everything was shades of gray. The trees, bushes, wheat fields – everything looked like an old black and white movie.
Once Ray got over his shock, he still had to find the formerly Yellow Brick Road. He had no idea where to look, so he trusted to his luck and just started walking.
After a couple of hours, his feet started to hurt. Then his legs. And finally, his back. After two days, Ray was giving up hope, when then he saw it, off in the distance, a gray town. Now he didn’t hurt so much.
As he got closer, he could see that the village was uninhabited. The buildings were munchkin-sized, and they were old, dilapidated, and falling down. Gardens were dead. Weeds grew everywhere.
Ray made his way to the center of town, and there it was – the Yellow Brick Road!
The red and yellow spiral at the beginning was now gray. It was overgrown with weeds and many bricks were broken or missing. It was the saddest thing he had ever seen, but if he listened, he could hear the faintest of echoes:
Follow the yellow brick road
Follow the yellow brick road
Follow follow follow follow
Follow the yellow brick road
“No sense in hanging around,” Ray thought. “This place is heartbreaking.”
He dug out three bricks and put them in his satchel. That was the easy part.
“How the hell do I get back?” he wondered.
Dorothy had travelled back to Kansas in the Great and Powerful Oz’s balloon, but that wasn’t an option.
While he was thinking things over, Ray dug up another brick. While holding it, he thought “I want to go home.”
The next thing he knew, he was back in Liberal, Kansas.
“The bricks grant wishes!” he thought. “Now I know why Lyman wants them so badly.”
The thought of Lyman owning wishing bricks was disturbing, but there was nothing he could do about it.
“A client’s a client and a contract’s a contract,” Ray thought. He had his standards.
Fortunately, Ozfest was still in full swing. He headed over to Auntie Em’s Fried Chicken Stand and ate a double order.
It was a long bus ride back to his office. He called Lyman as soon as he got there, and Lyman rushed over to claim his prize.
“Where are my bricks?” Lyman said.
“Right here,” said Ray, giving him the three bricks.
“What’s wrong with these?” said Lyman, his voice rising in anger. “Your assignment was to bring back bricks from the Yellow Brick Road and these are gray!”
“That’s all there is,” said Ray. “Everything is black and white. There’s nothing left of Oz as we knew it.”
“And I know why you want the bricks,” he added. “I wished to get back home while holding a brick, and I wound up back in Kansas.”
“So, what are you going to wish for? World peace? An end to hunger? Reverse global warming?”
Ray had little hope that Lyman would do any of these.
“Hah!” said Lyman, as he picked up a brick. “I wish to be the richest man on Earth!”
Nothing happened. In Lyman’s hands the brick was just a brick. He tried the other two, getting angrier and angrier.
“You’re not getting paid,” yelled Lyman. “I wanted yellow bricks, and you give me this worthless gray #@%!”
Ray expected this. Lyman stormed out of his office, leaving the bricks behind.
Ray had a wish, too. He’d harbored it ever since he had seen the condition of Oz.
He gathered up all the bricks, and said “I wish for Oz to return to its former glory, complete with Dorothy, witches, flying monkeys, all of it.”
Nothing happened. But slowly, as he looked at them, the bricks turned a bright yellow.
Ray smiled.
He kept the bricks for a few weeks, and they stayed yellow. He tried wishing for world peace, but nothing happened.
In the end, he decided to donate the bricks to the Dorothy Museum back in Liberal. People traveled from all over to see the authentic bricks from the Yellow Brick Road.
And back in Oz, Dorothy set out along the Yellow Brick Road with her little dog Toto to meet her destiny.
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My thanks to the great and powerful 
tigrkittn for catching a narrative error, which I corrected before the deadline.
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Date: 2024-08-19 09:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-08-19 02:26 pm (UTC)