The Oz Exception: Part Four

Meanwhile…back at the Vortex

Gwen and John passed through the vortex and were greeted by an odor that residents of the Springs often compare to “boiled diarrhea.” But Fenwick quickly closed the portal and the stench ceased.

“Sorry I forgot to mention that,” he said.

“Jesus, what was that?” Gwen was so overcome by the stink that she had yet to notice that John was no longer a ghost in her device, but was in the guise of a living person.

“The Spring,” said Fenwick, pointing at a bubbling black pool beside the vortex opening (the vortex, or portal is your standard SyFy Channel budget CGI looking shimmering, two dimensional swirl sort of thing). “It is said to originate from a crack in hell, but it serves to produce the magic in the realm. Whenever the vortex opens, the Spring’s smell gets out. That’s why we use it as little as possible.”

Gwen looked around. They were in a meadow surrounded by trees– bucolic, with lots of Sheep grazing far and near; but there was strangeness aplenty.  She saw a little blue sun in the sky, which clearly appeared to be moving. It was hard to look away from a sun zigzagging back and forth in the sky, but when she did, Gwen saw a series of identical hills on the horizon. They were exactly the same and appeared on the horizon in every direction. And there were wildly oversized common objects lying all around. Gwen saw a can opener that had to be three feet long lying near a twenty foot tall “pint” of Jack Daniels; Gwen figured the bottle was mostly empty due to a very long siphoning hose extending from the giant pint to a series of barrels on the ground. Behind the great pint stood at least ten uncracked others, a ladder lay against the first.  “How strange,” Gwen thought, “and this dude beside me looks just like John!”

“What? You’re real here?” Gwen said, realizing it was John. She poked his shoulder, but instead of touching flesh, he was elastic like a sheet of rubber.

“Hey,” John said. He poked Gwen on her shoulder,  but upon touch, his finger bent painlessly sideways.

“He’s real everywhere,” Fenwick said. “But things tend to change a bit when they pass through the vortex unless they are alive. Inanimate objects, as you see, greatly enlarge, which is great for our supplies. Ghosts take shapes that are, um, stretchy.”

Indeed, stretchy was a good word. John appeared to be forced into the fabric of reality. He was three-dimensional, but his existence in the fourth dimension of spacetime was also visual. When he moved, a series of ripples in spacetime formed around his being, as though he were suspended in water.

This was when Gwen figured that the natural laws of the universe were pretty much up for grabs in Saragun Springs and decided to stop questioning things. Therefore, she was not at all surprised to see me and Penrose the Flying Weasel enter the meadow.

End of Part Four

6 thoughts on “The Oz Exception: Part Four”

  1. Dale Williams W Barrigar's avatar Dale Williams W Barrigar says:

    Dear Authoress!

    The suspense continues, as do the LOLs. Thanks so much for stopping when you do, too! I love that this is serial fiction WITHOUT padding! In that sense, this is BETTER than Dickens or Twain (or King), with whom one sometimes needs to wade through miles and miles, and miles, of excess verbiage before getting to the good parts! Or once you get good enough as a reader, SKIP the bad parts entirely and leaf through the book until you land on the good parts, start there and stop where the good stuff ends. But there’s none of that here, because of the brevity that’s also being brought into play along with the wild imagination! Bravo! Edgar Allan Poe, greatest champion of American fictional brevity (even over Hawthorne or Hemingway), would love this!

    I found a cool Twain quote inside an excellent Charles Neider essay. Twain describes the best narrative/s as a flowing river and all that entails, then says:

    “…but always GOING, and always following at least one law, the law of NARRATIVE, which HAS NO LAW. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important, so that the trip is made.”

    I think he was making an argument for fiction that FLOWS naturally as opposed to being rigidly plotted like a John Grisham novel (or a billion zillion others). The ones that FLOW, in a spontaneous way, or at least in a seemingly spontaneous, maybe sometimes messy way, are the ones that LAST. This is true of Don Quixote, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Twain, Dickens, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Hemingway, Bukowski, Vonnegut, et al. (Vonnegut’s ability to plot, thank God, in a John Grisham kind of way, was nearly nonexistent. I don’t think Saul Bellow had ever even HEARD of the word “plot.”) FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, which Cormac McCarthy called one of the very, very greatest NOVELS of the second half American twentieth cen., also operates very much upon this “picaresque” (lasting) model. Vonnegut, Bellow, and Thompson, then, were all great comedians who knew how to “go with the flow.” (That can be extrapolated into THE TAO, too, in religious terms. And it’s part of what Jesus meant when he said: “Do not worry about where you will sleep or what you will eat.”)

    Yet there needs to be that tension of mental danger (for the artist, or the characters), and yours has that! Harry Crews called it “walking the wire,” by which he meant the trapeze wire. He said: “Walking the wire is everything; the rest is just waiting.”

    Thanks for walking the wire, Leila!

    Dale

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    • Thank you, Dale
      I believe I read those Twain thoughts, too. I also read a description by Dorothy Parker’s biographer, Marian Meade. She said there are two kinds of writers, long distance runners and sprinters. It’s not in length but in energy. I feel I am a sprinter. So, now that this thing is fully under way, gotta feeling I can produce 250-300 words I am alright with.
      Anyway, it is a bit hard to do, but that is part of the purpose and attraction.
      Thank you again for your encouragement!
      Leila

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