Something quick I scribbled on the train. Disclaimed.

It happened in the middle of the night. The windows of her room were dark, though the blinds were drawn. Glinda always left her curtains open, the windows unlocked, as though entertaining some fanciful notion of escape that she knew she would never carry out. There was a rap on the window, the 'clank' of a rounded pebble colliding with glass-

Or maybe it hadn't been night at all. Maybe it was a morning, sunny, as summer mornings in Oz generally were. And it was a voice that reached up to the window, not a pebble. The soft, carrying cry of-

It happened on a rainy afternoon, the kind of afternoon that confines people to their houses, content with the company of their books and fireplaces. And each other, Glinda supposed, but conversation mattered little nowadays. Really, how much could people possibly have to say to each other? At a certain point the topics run out- and silence is much more companiable.

So it was a rainy afternoon and there was a knock on the front door- where had Glinda scrounged the idea of a window from?- of the Chuffrey estate. One of the maids in her two piece uniform answered:

"Lady Glinda, there is a vagrant here requesting your counsel."

"A vagrant?" she had asked. "Why in Oz would I want to see a vagrant?"

No. The maid hadn't been involved. There had been a knock on her door, and she'd answered it with a sigh, having been awakened from a nap. Her headaches grew worse and worse.

"Hold on." She'd called to the knocker, pulling on a nightgown and fastening it around her naked body. Her husband had always bemoaned her habit of sleeping in the nude with the curtains drawn ("If someone were to see you!"), but Glinda reasoned that it was rainy that afternoon and people would hardly be squinting through the droplets to spy her body. (Or had it been sunny after all?). She opened the door in her robe, expecting Chuffrey.

"Glinda!"

There was a figure, cloaked, who stepped swiftly into the room. It was a woman's build, slim, tall, who threw back her hood to reveal-

Glinda was walking in her garden at dusk. She often took these turns about the grounds at night- (Or near night- did we say it was dusk?)- to escape the subtle claustrophobia of the mansion. She'd found a respect for nature- so untouched, so determined, so wild- and had taken a shine in her later years to admiring the brooks, the oaks, the small stream that cut the miniature woodland- how had that poet put it?

Where evergreen through crook does run

There sets the brilliant Godly sun

Whose light doth shine through Oz and on

Where fair Lurline did fly

Or something to that effect. She'd never been one for word-smug poets, with their analytical, vague view of the world. Simple beauty seemed much more prudent. She acknowledged the hypocrisy of this statement by touching the layer-thick dusting of foundation and glitter on her face.

Whatever. She shouldn't think so deeply about these things, it was unbecoming. She walked through, that irritating verse (religious rot) playing over and over in her head, admiring birch and oak and willow and-

A green face!

"Glinda!" she'd called (how did she arrive, anyway? Perhaps she'd flown in, like a bird. An eagle. There were always the whispers of that broom, though Glinda put that down to fanatical rumour-mongering. But the broom would do.) She stepped out of the greenery, blending all too well, and had stepped forward, pulling Glinda's lips to her own in a kiss that drove the talentless poet's verse straight from her mind-

Or maybe, Glinda thought, as she pulled close the windows for the evening and crawled into her bed- too large, she'd always said, it was as if she waited for someone to fill it- maybe none of it had happened at all.