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News of the Witch’s death travels unnaturally fast – it seems as if half of Oz knows within the hour. The celebration spills into the streets of Emerald City, drunken shouts echoing off the yellow brick. Inside the Palace tiktok servants hand out flutes of champagne and saffron cream to the upper class.
Glinda lingers in the back of the hall, half-hidden behind a sea of ice-sculptures. The nearest, an artist’s fanciful rendition of Dorothy Gale, captures her attention. All wrong, of course – too beautiful, too thin, eyes so ridiculously vacant – but still, there is something about the sharpness of the nose, the shape of the mouth…
“The Unnamed God himself sent her,” someone sighs.
“It was Lurline,” someone else whispers back. “To replace the lost Ozma.”
The saffron cream is clotted and thick. It has a metallic aftertaste, almost as if the tiktok servants have been dipping their fingers in.
Glinda spits it out onto the marble floor.
The band strikes up a waltz.
Glinda doesn’t remember very much of her school days.
Now, don’t look at her like that – how could she? Nearly twenty years between here and now. A long time. A lifetime. Half of hers. And such an awkward age, after all – who wants to remember that? Glinda is sensible. She remembers the broad edges, the general plotlines (arrival, enrolment in sorcery, graduation, etc.) and never looks too closely at that delicate middling bit.
But the mind is a tricky thing. Now, after everything, when Glinda finds she wants to examine those memories, take them out and dust them off and lay them on a table to pore over – she finds she can’t. They have faded, grown hazy from disuse.
(For instance, did Tibbett and Crope actually tie a boy to a maypole, or had that just been one of their stories? And Pfannee – had her hair been brown, or auburn? Was Boq truly able to fit his feet into her shoes?
Had Elphaba really smiled like that, with that edge, with those teeth?)
These are the details Glinda cannot remember. Sometimes she isn’t sure if she wants to.
A few of the Munchkinlanders attending want to kiss her hand, stroke her skirt. Glinda permits them with a twist of her wrist and a vacant smile.
There is a memory:
(A memory that Glinda doesn’t even know she remembers, it sits tucked away on a high shelf in her mind and is only ever pulled out to shape the fabric of dreams. Time has worn away its edges – the details are all muddled, topsy turvy, like looking through the wrong end of a pair of opera glasses. But. It is there.)
It is nearly twenty years ago, and Glinda is trying to teach Elphaba to dance.
A room. Their room. It is the middle of summer, or the end of fall. It is high noon, or teatime, or twilight. The room is full of light – either sunlight or candles, it’s hard to tell – but instead of illuminating things it hides them behind hazy flares.
“Elphie,” Glinda sighs. Their fingers get jumbled and caught during the spin out and their hipbones mash up against each other on the one-two-three-turn.
“It really is no use.” Elphaba untangles their clammy hands and flops down on the bed. The bedspread isn’t a true colour, but caught halfway between red and purple like it can’t make up its mind.
“Nonsense,” says Glinda, or maybe “Ridiculous.” She probably stamps her foot. “I refuse to believe anyone is a lost cause when it comes to dancing.”
“Well,” Elphaba huffs, “I expect I won’t care if I dance badly the rest of my life.”
“Your partners might.” Glinda frowns. “Fine,” she exclaims, extending a hand, “dance with me badly then,” and Elphaba might smile, or she might not. (In Glinda’s dreams, she always smiles.)
They take another jerky turn about the room. The light (from the sun, from the candles) flickers crazily along the walls.
It is years and years and years later, and Glinda’s dreams don’t borrow from that memory much anymore. And even if they do, her mind romanticizes the details beyond all hope of recognition – the dancing becomes quick and easy, elbows and feet are kept to themselves, and no one’s palms are ever damp. Sometimes there is a kiss.
Glinda never remembers when she wakes up.
Now, standing in the vast marble ballroom, listening to strangers toast the Witch’s death, all Glinda has left of the dance is a feeling. A wisp, a fragment, the suggestion of a hand at her waist.
Nothing more.
“Are you very upset, darling?” Sir Chuffrey asks during a lull in the dancing. “I seem to remember you telling me you knew her in school, or some such thing.”
(But Glinda doesn’t remember. Just the broad edges, the general plotline, none of the individual moments.
And oh, she didn’t know it would be important later. She didn’t. If she had, she would have paid more attention, she would have memorized every detail, every second, oh, if she had known—)
“I really didn’t know her all that well,” Glinda says airily, and they take another turn about the floor.