originally it was a boy

Dorothy came home late, barefoot and tired with one cheek swollen. Before he could have even see her, her scared black terrier was scratching at the front door. When she was within fifty feet of the house, he started barking and her aunt ran over to gather her up. She smelled of corn whiskey and soil, like cigarettes and other people's spit. Her checkered blue dress was torn and her makeup smeared across her soft pink cheeks. The storm subsided and she went with them to celebrate. She chose to go with them, into the fields where nobody could see em. By the time the sun had gone down, they were so deep in the thicket it was already dark. They took advantage of her there, drunk and laughing underneath the chitting of the crows and the flapping wings of invisible bats, below the gnarled trees ravaged by the storm, that moaned hen the wind wove through them. With the first one on top, it felt as though a house was pressed on her abdomen. She was pinned, sucking in air whenever she could and breathing in short bursts.

She collapsed into her aunt's arms and made up a story. There were rainbows in the story, and emeralds, a tin woodsman and a wizard, and a gentle beast There was a strawman, too, just like Uncle Henry's but animated, whose twisted gait and grotesque visage frightened off the savage brutes that stalked the woods. Emma held her, brushed her hair, and held a compress against her skin. She told her niece that she was sick, although they both knew she wasn't, and suffering fever hallucinations. She encouraged her to tell the story often, until she was convinced it was wonderful. When the baby was born dead, they blamed the sickness and called it a shame, and blamed the twister for opening up the earth and covering everything with dirt and disease, and they called it a shame, and her Auntie Em called it a 'damn shame', even though she was a churchgoing woman, because thirty years earlier the same thing happened to her.