“Precisely!” The little woman laughed again. “Just as it should be!”
Dorothy looked down at the red shoes. She wiggled her toes to make them sparkle in the sunshine. “The prime of my life,” she repeated. “Just as it should be.”
She looked into the bubble again, but Kansas was gone.
She giggled, and then she laughed. She slipped off the shoes, and her bare toes sank into the soft grass. She hesitated only a moment, and then she picked up the shoes and turned toward the river.
One by one, first the left and then the right, she threw the shoes into the blue water.
They splashed, and floated for a moment, turning and dipping in the current. Then, glittering like rubies in the soft sunlight, they sank, and disappeared.
LOINCLOTH by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta
All alone in the props warehouse on the back lot of Duro Studios, he made his case to Shirley in his mind, rehashing the argument they had had the night before. This time, though, he was bold and articulate, and he easily convinced her.
Walter Groves opened another one of the big crates and tore out the packing straw mixed with Styrofoam peanuts. “Not exciting enough for you, huh? You don’t feel fireworks? I’m too sedate-not a man’s man? Think about it, Shirley. Women say they want nice guys, the shy and sensitive type, men who are sweet and remember birthdays and anniversaries. Isn’t that what you told me you needed-someone just like me? You’ve always despised hypocrites. But what do you do? You fall for a bad boy, someone with tattoos and a heavy smoking habit, someone who can’t keep a job for more than a month, someone like that last jerk you dated, who treated you rough and left you out in the cold.
“But I loved you. I treated you with respect, drove you to visit your grandmother in the hospital, and fixed your computer when the hard drive crashed. I got out of bed when you called at three in the morning and came to your apartment just to hold you because you had a nightmare and couldn’t sleep. I gave you flowers, dinners by candlelight, and love notes-not to mention the best six months of my life. ‘Someday, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon’ ”-he pictured himself as Bogart in Casablanca -“you’ll realize what you threw away. But I won’t be waiting. I’m a good man, and I deserve a wonderful woman who values me for who I am, who appreciates my dedication, and wants a nice, normal life. Go ahead. Have your shallow, exciting fling with Mr. James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. I’ll find someone sincere who wants Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Scattering straw and packing material, he pulled a long plastic elephant tusk out of the prop box. The faux ivory was sharp at one end and painted with “native symbols.” He glanced at the label on the box: JUNGO’S REVENGE. After marking the name of the film on his clipboard, he listed the stored items beneath the title. He sighed.
If only he could have come up with just the right answers last night, maybe Shirley wouldn’t have dumped him. If only he could have been tough like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, confident like Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind, or romantic like Dermot Mulroney in The Wedding Date. Instead, he had squirmed, speechless with shock, his lower lip trembling as if he were Stan Laurel caught in an embarrassing failure. Walter had made no heartfelt appeals or snappy comebacks; those would have been as much fiction as a script for any Duro Studios production.
Shirley had grabbed her stuff-along with some of his, though he hadn’t had the presence of mind to mention it-and stormed out of the apartment.
Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. That’s who she reminded him of.
The large black walkie-talkie at his hip crackled, and even through the static of the poor-quality unit, he heard the lovely musical speech of Desiree Drea. Her voice never failed to make his heart skip a beat, then go back and skip it all over again. “Walter? Mr. Carmichael wants to know how you’re coming with the props. He needs me to type up the inventory.”
“I… um… I-” He looked down at the box, searching for words, and seized upon the letters stenciled to the crate. “I’m just now up to Jungo’s Revenge. I’ve finished about half of the work.”
As Desiree responded, he could hear the producer’s voice bellowing in the background. “Jungo! It’s all worthless crap. Trash it.”
The secretary softened the message as she relayed it. “Mr. Carmichael suggests that it’s of no value, so please put it in the Dumpster.”
“And tell him he damn well better stay until he finishes,” the voice in the background growled. “We need that building tomorrow to start shooting Horror in the Prop Warehouse.”
“Tell him I’ll do what needs to be done,” Walter said, then clicked off the walkie-talkie, though he would gladly have chatted with Desiree for hours. He didn’t have anything better to do that evening than work, anyway. He was very conscientious and would finish the job.
Chris Carmichael-producer of low-budget knock-off movies. The Jungo ape-man series, a bad Tarzan knock-off, had skated just a little too close to Tarzan’s copyright line. The threatened legal action had caused the films to flop, even though they went direct to video. Walter had seen one of them and thought that the movies were bad enough to have flopped all on their own, without any legal difficulties to help them along. If anything, the publicity had boosted the sales.
He pulled out the other plastic elephant tusk, then some ugly looking tribal masks, three rubber cobras, and a giant plastic insect as big as his palm that was labeled DEADLY TSETSE FLY. Walter shook his head. He had to agree about the worthlessness of these props. There wouldn’t be any collector interested in even giving them shelf space. If there had been enough fans to generate a few collectors, the Jungo franchise might never have disappeared.
Near the bottom of the crate he found a rattle, a shrunken head, and another tribal mask, but these props were far superior to the others. They looked handmade, with real wood and bone. The shrunken head had an odd leathery feel that made him wonder if it was real. He shuddered as he took it out of the crate.
It seemed unlikely that Chris Carmichael, a tight-wad with utter contempt for his audiences as well as his employees, would spend money on the genuine articles to use as props. Maybe a prop master had purchased them online or found them in a junk bin somewhere. Beneath the last of the witch doctor items, at the very bottom of the crate, he found a scrap of cloth that made him smile as he pulled it out and brushed off the bits of straw that clung to it.
A leopard-skin loincloth, the only garment Jungo the Ape Man had ever worn in the films-all the better to show off his well-developed physique, of course. Walter tried to remember. According to the story, Jungo had killed a leopard with his bare hands when he was only five years old and had made the loincloth out of its pelt. Apparently, the loincloth had grown along with the boy. Maybe the leopard had been part Spandex… Jungo was probably the type of man Shirley would have fallen for-wild, tanned, brawny, and barely capable of stringing together three-word sentences. Walter groaned at the thought.
Now Desiree was another story entirely. Even on the big studio lot, they often crossed paths. He saw her in the commissary at lunch almost daily-because he timed his lunch hour to match hers. She was strikingly beautiful with her reddish-gold hair, her large blue eyes, her delicate chin, and when she smiled directly at him, as she had done three times now, it made him feel as if someone in the special effects shop had created the most spectacular sunrise ever.
But Walter still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to ask if he could sit and eat with her. He was a nobody who did odd jobs around the lot for the various producers. Some of them were nice, and some of them were… like Chris Carmichael. The man was Dabney Coleman in 9 to 5, or Bill Murray before his transformation in Scrooged. Carmichael had put in a requisition, and Walter had pulled the card: One man needed to clear prop warehouse. It was really a job for four men and four days, but Carmichael always slashed his budgets to leave more money in his own expense account. Carmichael didn’t even know who Walter Groves was.