The next morning, Concierge Girl brought my freshly-laundered clothes, then just stood kind of awkwardly by the door. It would be my last night in the Emerald City—was I expected to tip her? Did they even have money in Oz? She was kind of sticking one cheek out a little, like she was expecting a kiss or something?

  I gave her a meat pie. She looked at it like it was a dead rat, then thanked me profusely and left.

  We swung by the front gates to drop off the sunglasses that my companions still had bolted over their eyes, and this time the Guardian seemed absolutely heartbroken to see us go.

  “You are now our ruler,” he said to the Scarecrow. “You must come back to us as soon as possible!”

  “I certainly shall if I am able,” the Scarecrow replied. “But I must help Dorothy to get home, first.”

  It was all very charming, but the truth was, I had other things weighing on my mind. We headed due south—there was technically a road going in our general direction, but the countryside was pleasant enough, and by now we had gotten used to off-roading it. The sun was shining, the air was so fresh you could almost taste it, and Toto ran around us in circles, chasing moths and butterflies, barking merrily all the time.

  I had settled into a bit of a funk.

  After a few minutes we turned to take a last look at the Emerald City, a mass of towers and steeples and that big-ass dome of the Wizard’s palace rising up above the city walls. At least it all looked green from the outside.

  “Oz was not such a bad Wizard, after all,” the Woodsman said, tapping his tin chest.

  “He knew how to give me brains, and very good brains, too,” the Scarecrow said.

  “If Oz had taken a dose of the same courage he gave me,” the Lion added, “he would have been a brave man.”

  I left it alone. As far as I was concerned, that guy was a fucking dick. He had been dropped into this land just like I had, but instead of spending any effort to get home, or even treating the people he met with basic human decency, he pretended to be a god, made them build a city for him, and then hid in his throne room for literally decades so they wouldn’t find out he was a fraud. Fuck that guy.

  If I was being honest, though, it wasn’t the futhermucking Wizard that was bothering me. I’d had a restless night, and while I’d lain awake staring at hideous, ornate wainscoting, I was pretty sure I’d figured out what was really going on. I had made it to the end of the story, but the story hadn’t ended. And it wasn’t because I was playing a video game and I hadn’t done the puzzles right. When that happens in a game, you just lose, and either quit or start over. You’re not trapped there forever. No one would ever design a game like that.

  No, the reason my stay in Oz hadn’t ended after I’d killed the Wicked Witch was because in the real world I was laying in a hospital bed somewhere, and my head wound was too severe to recover from the coma.

  It made more sense than any of my other theories. There was no way virtual reality technology had advanced enough that it encompassed all five of your senses and was utterly indistinguishable from the real world. And KGB brainwashing? Come on. At first I had discounted the idea that I was in a dream, because I’m pretty sure that, if anything, my subconscious would have gone with the Judy Garland version. But if I was stuck in a coma, you know what my loved ones would probably do while they waited tearfully by my side, hoping against hope that I’d recover?

  Fucking read to me.

  And although L. Frank Baum wasn’t the sort of thing my Mom would choose, it was totally up Madeline’s alley. She had received an off-brand Kindle knockoff for her birthday one year, and stuffed it full of free public domain shit. Plus, she was always trying to get me to read more. And my Mom would think it was all heartwarming and adorable, too—my Mom loved Madeline—so she’d just sit there and let her read whatever. My broken head was constructing a reality from this continuous audio input, but when it got to the part where it was supposed to wake up, it couldn’t. And it might never be able to. The plot was over, but the story just kept going.

  We walked all day, through gorgeous, boring farmland, and nothing fucking happened.

  That night, asleep on the soft, long grass with nothing but the stars over me, I dreamed. I dreamed that I was back at the mall, browsing through shitty band t-shirts at Spencer’s with Glinda the Good Witch from the movie and Madeline, who had such a big crush on Glinda that she could barely speak. But I knew it was a dream.

  So I tried a trick I had been using to wake up from nightmares ever since I was a little girl. I had always loved my occasional flying dreams, and every once in a while I had a scary falling one. But at some point I picked up on the fact that in my dreams I never actually landed. I climbed up on a mall bench and jumped off. Sure enough, before I hit tile, I found myself awake, lying in a field with the Scarecrow staring down at me creepily, as per usual.

  My sudden waking must have startled him. “Dorothy? Are you feeling well?”

  “Shut up. I need to try something.” The Lion was snoring away on his belly beside me, so I carefully climbed up on his back, planted my bare feet in his mane, and jumped.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  I hit the ground hard, scraping the bottom of my foot on a rock. Stupid. If I was trapped in a coma, of course I wouldn’t be able to just snap myself out of it willingly.

  The thing was, once I knew I was in a dream, I could usually control what happened in it. But this… it definitely wasn’t the real world, but it didn’t exactly follow dream logic, either. Were the rules different for coma dreams? Compared to the hazy mall scene I had just woken from—the details of which were already dissipating in my head like cotton candy—this felt utterly real. My foot was throbbing at that very moment, and after I rubbed it to inspect the damage, and lifted my fingers to my lips, I could taste the blood.

  It was completely unlike any dream I’d ever had, coma or otherwise. I mean, if Oz wasn’t a real place, it was certainly indistinguishable from one. And as much as I had idly speculated about hallucinogenic drugs, people who were actually tripping could tell that their senses were wacked out. This wasn’t like that at all.

  There was a word for people who weren’t able to distinguish between fantasy and reality. But I wasn’t ready to start exploring that theory yet.

  Needless to say, I didn’t sleep much for the rest of the night. When morning came, I poked a little at my breakfast, and we resumed our journey south. My friends could see that something was wrong, but I laughed off their inquiries and claimed that I was only tired. Still, ever since we had left the Emerald City, I had been distant, and I’m sure they felt it acutely. My Mom always said I should go into construction, I was so good at putting up—

  Walls? We crested a small hill and found ourselves staring at an impenetrably thick forest, cutting across the fields like a sheer cliff, extending to the east and west as far as the eye could see. Oh, shit. It was like my subconscious mind felt threatened by all my random questioning and introspection, and was shoving literal barriers up through cracks I had bored into my psyche.

  “What shall we do now?” the Lion asked.

  “The Flying Monkeys could carry us over these woods quite easily,” the Woodsman said.

  “No Flying Monkeys,” I said. “Not yet.” I hadn’t walked for a goddamned day and a half so that I could waste my last monkey wish on a forest. We walked through forests all the time. Besides, if it was my stupid brain making these woods, I should be able to make a pathway through it, right?

  I closed my eyes and concentrated. Make a pathway, make a pathway, make a pathway.

  “Hey,” the Scarecrow called out. “I found a pathway!”

  Crap. I had kind of been hoping that wouldn’t work.

  “There’s a big tree with such wide-spreading branches that there’s room to pass beneath,” he said. “Right here! Follow me and I’ll—AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

  Just as he came under the first branches, they reached down, twisted around his limbs, picked him up and flung him over our heads into the field behind us. The Scarecrow wasn’t injured, of course, but did have a bit of the stuffing knocked out of him.

  Oh, that’s how you want to play this, subconscious?

  “There’s another space between the trees over here,” the Lion said.

  “Let me try again,” the Scarecrow said. “Perhaps this time I’ll—AAAAAAAAAAAAH!” The branches immediately seized him and tossed him back out again.

  The Scarecrow picked himself up and smoothed out a few lumps. “Surely a third attempt won’t—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “Let’s try a different strategy.” I stepped up to the treeline, just out of the reach of any wooden limbs.

  “Trees?” I shouted into the forest (and, you know, whatever else needed shouting into). “Trees are your big play here? We LITERALLY brought a TREE-CUTTING MACHINE. Woodsman! How many trees have you chopped down since I’ve met you?”

  The Tin Woodsman planted his feet beside me and put his hands on his hips. “One hundred and seven,” he said.

  “One hundred and—wait, what?” I was going to say, like, six. Was the guy chopping trees down all night, every night, just out of spite? Well, whatever. “What I’m trying to say is, DO NOT FUCK with this guy.”

  The Woodsman lifted his axe and approached the treeline slowly, and when a big branch grabbed at him, he cut it in two with a single swing. The entire tree shook, as if in pain.

  “Come on!” he shouted. “Be quick!” We rushed under the tree without a scratch, except for Toto, who yelped as he was caught by a small branch. But the Woodsman quickly put his axe through it and set the little dog free.

  After that, the trees left us alone. Either it was just the outer row that was enchanted to keep out intruders, or we had scared this forest shitless. Either way, we were able to travel through the woods without trouble. It was dark in there, and the foliage looked ugly and twisted.

  Subtle. If the symbolism of bringing my friends through the barriers of my subconscious mind was supposed to bring us closer together, though, it wasn’t working. If anything, I was feeling even more alone. Because if all of this was a figment of my imagination, that included the three of them. How do you have a heart-to-heart with someone you suspect you may have made up? Like, if the Scarecrow asked me if something was wrong, was that just part of my brain trying to psychoanalyze? Or was he the part of me that knew I hated people asking me if something was wrong, throwing up a red flag?

  Or was he the coma, trying to distract me from the fact that I was in a fucking coma?

  I was starting to freak myself out. I have no idea how long we walked—it could have been minutes or hours. I was completely lost in my thoughts, few of which made logical sense. Was I supposed to bring the others with me into this forest? Should I be here alone? Should I be here at all?

  Suddenly we came to the edge of the woods, only to find a high, white wall as bright and smooth as porcelain. Again, it stretched as far as the eye could see.

  “I cannot think why this wall is here,” the Scarecrow said, befuddled. “Nor what country it conceals.”

  I just stared at it, my eyes wide. “The wall is my sanity,” I said. “Beyond it lies madness.”