Toto

by A.J. Hackwith

Genres: Fantasy; Fantasy action & adventure; General Fiction; Animals

Synopsis

The true hero of The Wizard of Oz takes center stage in this brilliant, delightfully snarky reimagining from the author of The Library of the Unwritten.

I was mostly a Good Dog until they sold me out to animal control, okay?

But if it’s a choice between Oz, with its creepy little singing dudes, and being behind bars in gray old Kansas, I’ll choose the place where animals talk and run the show for now, thanks.

It’s not my fault that the kid is stuck here too, or that she stumbled into a tug-of-war over a pair of slippers that don’t even taste good. Now one witch in good eyeliner calls her pretty and we’re off on a quest? Teenagers.

I try to tell her she’s falling in with the wrong crowd when she befriends a freaking hedge wizard made of straw, that blue jay with revolutionary aspirations, and the walking tin can. Still, I’m not one to judge when there’s the small matter of a coup in the Forest Kingdom.... 

Look, something really stinks in Oz, and this Wizard guy and the witches positively reek of it. As usual, it’s going to be up to a sensible little dog to do a big dog’s job and get to the bottom of it.

And trust me: Little dogs can get away with anything.

Release date: November 12, 2024

Publisher: Ace

Print pages: 352

Sample

The little guys were singing again.

Again.

Look. I've got nothing against the Munchkins, as they call themselves. (Yeah, I made that face too. Sounded like a snack to me.) They'd been nothing but welcoming so far, and I doubt many rural folk would have been half as welcoming if an alien spaceship had crash-landed on top of their town. But we'd, in an act of pure ridiculousness, landed on the head of some town bully, and everyone was just off-their-rocker thrilled about it. They had not stopped singing about it since we crawled, shaky on our paws, out the front door. Everyone was just being folksy and hospitable as heck, and Aunt Em had drilled into Dorothy the kind of basic Midwestern manners to be polite and grateful.

But the singing.

Here's the thing: I am a little dog of no musical training, but when a gang of grown men in shorts and suspenders and holding candy clubs stepped forward and started serenading Dorothy about a league of traditional masculinity and men's rights, I was inclined to slow-fade into the bushes. I don't care if they called themselves something cute like the "Tartpatch Gang." Take it from a dog who has accomplished many calculated hijinks with his sterling reputation intact-you can get away with a lot of terrible shit when you're small and cute.

I snuffled around in the dirt long enough to be reassured that, at least, the dirt smelled like normal dirt in this land, and not like . . . chocolate cake or something. The dirt was so rich, it almost made my nose itch, and there was not a trace of Uncle Henry's CropXtreme™ fertilizer anywhere. I didn't even smell a pesticide, and the leaves on the bushes above me were untouched. Overhead I spied butterflies the size of saucers, but I couldn't hear the constant drone of gnats or horseflies anywhere in the Technicolor rotoscope of a village we were in. I don't know how far from home the tornado had carried us, but it was obvious this . . . well, wasn't Kansas.

Not that I was in mourning: Kansas was the worst, okay? Flat of geography and philosophy, the good people of Kansas embraced gray as a state of mind. As a vibe, one might say. My whole life was pretty much limited to the farm, the joke of a town, and Dorothy's pocket screen. What life I had made had all been screwed over when the sheriff and her cronies got to the Gales' and-

The thought made me drop to my belly under the bush and stare out at the Tartpatch Gang shitheads with their little candy batons as they did their little patriotic goose step around Dorothy. I kept an eye on her out of habit. She stood there, smiling awkwardly in a way only a painfully anxious sixteen-year-old Midwestern girl can. I was probably the only one who noticed how her shoulders were retracting toward her ears, as if she could magically turtle into her oversize black hoodie. It had How do you want to do this? emblazoned in red letters on the back, which was a catchphrase from our favorite pocket screen show. I always thought it was kind of funny, because it was a question no one ever asked a young person, not even once. No matter how constantly Dorothy wore the hoodie. Usually she was just told how things would be done. Underneath she still had on the navy skater dress and the checker-print leggings she had been wearing when I burst into her room after . . .

Right. That.

Even here, in the middle of what was either a crazy fairyland or a dying fever dream, I still couldn't let it go. Betrayal has a way of sticking in your throat like a chicken bone, and the Gales had done the worst. Well, at least Aunt Em and Uncle Henry had. Sheriff Alice had shown up with an overblown charge about how I'd been seen in Mrs. Brumley's stupid ol' garden-oh, I'm sorry, on a law-abiding citizen's private property-again and had committed crimes. She couldn't overlook them this time. Sheriff Alice was here as The Man. The Man! Cranky ol' Mrs. Brumley had reported me to The Man! And the sheriff arrived with a nervous-looking older woman carrying a large net and a tiny cage. The sheriff was waving some kind of paper and insisting that my family give me up, hand me over to the lady who introduced herself as the animal control officer. I thought that was just a story made up to scare weaning pups! Like . . . like restricted-diet dog kibble! But no, the animal control lady was here to take me. Intending to haul me off like some kind of livestock!

I remember lolling in the hallway, smug and at ease, listening to Sheriff Alice lay out her case and waiting for it. Uncle Henry wouldn't even bother to get up out of his La-Z-Boy if I knew him. He'd just give that nasty ol' badge a look over the top of his paper and that would be that. Aunt Em would shrug her shoulders with a sweet, helpless smile (as if she wasn't the one who told everyone their sits and stays around here) and introduce the polyester butts of those two uniforms to the door.

But then Uncle Henry looked silently at Aunt Em. And Aunt Em looked at her hands. And I heard a gasp from Dorothy. Right before Aunt Em mumbled, "We can't go against the law, girl. Understand, not with the way things have been since the ways things went last spring . . ."

"No . . ." Dorothy said, though I had a hard time hearing it over the creaking chair as Uncle Henry stood up and my pulse kind of exploded in my head.

I was a Good Dog, okay? A good dog! I didn't chew shoes or get onto the kitchen table or chase the chickens (too much). I didn't dig holes or run away. I learned sit and stay and come and I slept next to Dorothy on the bed every night, watched every pocket screen show with her, and protected her from every bad dream and selflessly defeated every Cheez-It crumb that dared to fall from her fingers. I kept rats out of the cellar and made sure not a single mailman or delivery truck snuck up on the farm! These were Good Dog things, and I'd always been told the lines between Good Dog and Bad Dog were simple and clear. I was the best Good Dog I knew how to be and had been since Dorothy had brought me home as a pup.

And my family was just . . . handing me over? Like that?

I didn't believe it; I was in shock. That's why I had no fight in me when Dorothy scooped me up, still arguing my innocence. At least she still believed in me, I guess. I could smell salt on the air, and I think it was instinct to try to lick the tears off her cheek half-heartedly, which made her cry and squeeze me more tightly. Then suddenly it was Uncle Henry's hands on me. Uncle Henry's big, calloused farmer's hands, which had always been the ones to pick mud from my fur or pluck me up out of danger when I fell in the hog pen as a clumsy pup. His hands closed around me and he was wresting me out of Dorothy's arms now, shoving me into a fusty, weird-smelling, shoddy cage that the awful animal control lady had brought.

And . . . and then, Dorothy was sobbing and Aunt Em was gripping her shoulders to hold her back, her own face turned away, and Uncle Henry was there, just looking at me through the bars, and I wondered if that was the sad, reassuring face he gave his hogs as he sent them off.

I wondered if the hogs had been so certain they were loved beforehand too.


What happened next? Of course, I . . . I escaped. Stupid Animal Control Lady had brought a cage meant for-I don’t know-rabbits or kittens or something. Not a determined and mentally anguished terrier. She threw me into the open back of her pickup truck and didn’t realize I was gone before she got even halfway down the drive.

If I hadn't still been in shock, I might have been smarter. If I had been smarter, maybe none of this would have happened. I might not have ended up on my belly, beneath some Technicolor rosebushes, listening to suspiciously patriotic men with candy cane batons sing about brotherhood right now. But I wasn't being smart right then. I was being dumb; I was still trying to be a Good Dog.

I ran right back to the farmhouse, and at least had the sense to sneak around the side and bound up the back way into our-I mean, into Dorothy's-bedroom. I was lucky the window was still open, as the wind was picking up something terrible with the storm moving in.

Dorothy was there, crying her heart out. Uselessly, in retrospect. What good was crying going to do me as I was being sent to critter prison? At the time, maybe it tugged on my still-reeling emotions, because I jumped up on her bed and burrowed under her arm for comfort. That snapped her into action, and she wiped her snot off on her hoodie quick. It didn't take long for us to concoct a plan to run away until this whole mess blew over. Maybe to the big city, to Topeka even. Anything could happen in Topeka!

Here's a tip I'll give any other pups out there for free: if your teenage human suggests running away during a tornado to solve your problems, don't. Because we got barely a mile away in the ripping rain before the sirens kicked in and we panicked. We turned back for home, only to get there in time to find everyone else had piled down into the storm shelter (real ancient, antique farmhouses like ours don't exactly have solid basement foundations; ours had been dug straight into the dirt until Uncle Henry retrofitted it with some metal and bags of cement years later-see if they tell you that in the glowing HGTV walk-throughs) and we made it only as far as the bedroom before . . . well.

Dorothy once showed me on her pocket screen a video of a demonstration of the power of tornadoes. It's the sort of disaster porn that kids growing up in the Midwest are kind of immune to after a certain age. The clips are pretty terrifying to me at least: impaling a telephone pole with a piece of straw, flipping a roof upside down and setting it back down on a house . . . The list goes on.

Our farmhouse is old as dirt. In the living room Aunt Em has a plaque given to the Gales by some historical society commemorating the farm's being in their family for a hundred years or something, and the house is part of the original homestead that's been around nearly as long. So I figured if a tornado hit the house, it'd just disintegrate. But I was wrong. I lost track of the details of the ride, because Dorothy was squeezing me tightly enough to make me poop a little, but when it was all over, we opened our eyes and were still in what was mostly a bedroom. Only a quarter of one wall had kind of cracked to let a giant swath of the bluest sky you've ever seen stream in and . . . everything had changed.

Everything.

Including me.