Warm Daylight

Dorothy was woken up by sunlight. The green glass panes threw off warm daylight in prismatic slivers, that drew themselves across to wake the sleeping Princess of Oz's eyes from their stubborn state of late-morning weekend slumber. 

Unlike in the hustle-bustle life that a farm girl could reasonably expect to lead in early nineteenhundreds Kansas, in Oz there was very little that you necessarily had to do until you were good and ready for it. Time was more of a gentle suggestion than a relentless march. 

Dorothy rolled around, and let her ruffled golden hair-bob fan and flail all over the satin pillowcases. In the past few years, Ozma and Dorothy had certainly let themselves grow up a few stages, and as a side effect of this willful maturation, had quickly found themselves outgrowing even Ozma's formidable royal canopy childhood bed. So Ozma (with Dorothy's consent) made an official commission to the finest Bedmaker in the Land of the Gillikins, that they might have a suitably sized bed that would fit both of them and then some. 

Upon receiving the radiant princess of the Emerald City's letter of request, the Bedmaker sprang into action and hurried over to the royal palace of Oz and, upon her arrival at sunset, went over to the royal bedroom and made the bed, ensuring that no bits of sheet-fabric or pillow-case on the diminutive bed went unsmoothed. The wise and widely adored Ozma realized her mistake and shared a giggle over it with Dorothy. "I think you might oughta have contacted an Actual Bedmaker!", suggested Dorothy pleasantly. Ozma praised her intimate companion's useful insight, and then proceeded to write a letter to an Actual Bedmaker. 

The Actual Bedmaker set to work, and after about a week she had made and delivered an Actual Bed, which was twice as large as Ozma's childhood bed, had higher and finer canopies and silkier, sleeker curtains. Fitting the theme of a bed made for two Ozian princesses to share, the canopy and curtains, the slats and posts were all emerald, jade and malachite tones, but on the inside the bed was covered in comforters, sheets and pillowcases in tasteful purple hues, in lavender, lilac, blurple and orchid. A subtle nod to the purple-loving culture of the Gillikins!, Ozma noted, and so it was. But the sheets are all rumpled and the comforter is almost entirely off it! exclaimed Ozma disappointedly, upon further investigation of their new acquisition. Ozma, honey, give the poor lady some slack., chided Dorothy. After all, she's an Actual Bedmaker, but not a Bedmaker, so it only makes sense that her beds would come unmade. Ah, that's right, said Ozma, as she and Dorothy engaged themselves in the shared labor of positioning the sheets and comforters properly and smoothing out their rumples and wrinkles.

And so this was the very bed that Dorothy at this moment simply couldn't bring herself to get out of. It was just so pleasant! So pleasant to not have to get up and fetch firewood, or start up the fire in the ovens, or go through the whole wrig-a-ma-role of retrieving animal products from ornery barnyard critters. Even when she finally got up and running for the day, and she got herself bathed and dressed and joined Ozma on duty taking audiences in the throne room, even when she was working in her official capacity as a Princess, it all just felt like a lot of fun. And heck, she wasn't worried about getting spoiled either. Dorothy had decided long ago, not too long after she had moved her family to the Emerald City and started cohabitating with Ozma, that instead of spoiling, she would simply *ferment.* After all, as Aunt Em had taught her back in Kansas, a spoiled thing is both inedible and uneatable, but a fermented thing is entirely wholesome to eat and is all the tastier and more pleasant for its having fermented. Spoiling yields only unpleasant food waste, but fermentation is, to name only a few, sourdough, sauerkraut, pickled plums, pickled onions, pickled tomatoes, pickled cucumbers, pickled eggs, yoghurt, buttermilk, cottage cheese, regular cheese, and a strange thing she'd eaten in Munchkinland one time that was called blue cheese.

That's right. Dorothy was being good. She wasn't doing any harm by taking it easy. It was a weekend anyhow, so she could take it easy today. (in Oz, Oz being a proper society that runs more or less as it should, the weekend is five days and the working week is two, so that everyone can be very well-rested for their work). All that silky satin plushness of the sheets and comforters had created quite the heat pocket, however, so Dorothy made haste to kick the sheets and blankets off. The cool air of the bedroom was warmed by the streaming-in daylight, creating a pleasantly brackish temperature gradient in the room. Dorothy felt at ease, and relaxed into her bed again.

"S'pose I'd better check my Magic-Picture Compact Mirror..." Dorothy reasoned with herself. She pulled the aforementioned compact mirror, a new product based on Ozma's signature magical item and intended for purposes like communication and art, off her nightstand and flipped it open. Instead of that miniature dust devil of face-powder that usually emerges when one opens a compact mirror, Dorothy opened onto a clean, polished magic-picture with a bunch of oblique push-buttons, knobs, touchpads and control-sticks below it (where the powder would usually be) that could be used to control the magical device's manifested images, some of which were still images and more of which were like photoplays. Most of the images she scrolled onto were of people visibly and verbally engaged in the practice of Exchanging Opinions, which is a sort of game where you talk past each other until the both of you walk away feeling both deeply annoyed and profoundly superior. That wasn't of much interest to Dorothy. Then there were a number of Historians whose image could be accessed by such means, not the Royal Oz Historians but chroniclers of the histories pieced together from glimpses and drifted-in artifacts of outside worlds. Dorothy wasn't much interested in this either, but lately Ozma had become more and more fascinated with them, them being the worlds outside which had seemed to meet with a great deal more ill fortune than Oz itself, and had in recent weeks been deliberating on some ways that she might help the outside world without compromising the barrier. Prompted to thoughts of Ozma by this line of thinking, Dorothy responded to a few hours-old messages in her group chat with Glinda the Good and Ozma, speaking in that peculiar patois of references and associations that the closest and dearest of friends tend to develop amongst themselves. And in her family group chat, there was, as usual, an unbroken string posted by Uncle Henry of memes about crops. Uncle Henry sure loved his crop memes.

By the time Dorothy realized how long the Magic-Picture Compact Mirror had been sucking her attention away, it had already long since rolled past noon. "Oh! Dagnabbit, I needs to get moving or else Ozma is gonna find me in here with daylight half gone poking around on the mirror and have a giggle at me." She finally managed to peel herself off the bed, and neatly made it (having learned well the lessons from the Bedmaker debacle), then shucked everything, threw it in the hamper and dashed into the royal shower room, making knobs do this and that until a sort of waterfall began to cascade into the splash-protective cylinder of Ozian greenglass. As she shampooed, conditioned, treated, lathered and puff-scrubbed, Dorothy daydreamed, and when she wasn't daydreaming she was bursting into loud, sweet song, and when she got to a point where she forgot the words she would go back to daydreaming. 

Ozma and Dorothy had had a splendid adventure recently in Glinda's domain, helping Glinda and her crimson-clad girl-army find their stolen vowels and ending their state of temporary linguistic adversity, upon which the two young women were much celebrated and toasted, and Glinda the Good had, as had become customary, invited them into her personal chambers to spend the entire merry night feasting and revelling together. She sure was one lucky girl!, thought Dorothy as she impelled the waterfall to cease and started wringing her cleaned and conditioned wet hair out. She'd sure gotten lucky ever since that tornado struck. Without that, she'd never have met her first real friends the Tin Woodsman, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion. The Wicked Witches of the East and West would still be around oppressing and enslaving the Winkies and Munchkins, that humbug of a Wizard would never have made his exodus from his usurped throne. Glinda the Good would have had to helplessly watch her beloved homeland languish under Evil from within a little cloister of Goodness, and Ozma, fairy-queen and rightful ruler of Oz, would probably still be under Mombi's cruel thumb, forever stuck as a boy! "Maybe I'm just the kinda lucky girl who makes other girls lucky, too!" reflected Dorothy wisely.

Maybe she was just the kinda lucky girl who made other girls lucky, too.

Dorothy felt so good at having accomplished her morning shower only a few hours late that she decided to reward herself by throwing her betoweled body and head back onto the bed. Only so she could dry off, she reasoned. But long after Princess Dorothy was dry, she had fallen fast asleep once again, seduced by the siren song of the bed-softness and having stayed up a little too late the night before.

There was still warm daylight streaming in through the skylights by the time the adventuresome girl startled awake from her bold afternoon nap. Even through the green glass, some faint inkling of the pink sky remained, and the light-prisms that fell on her were accented accordingly. And when she realized that Ozma was standing at the open bedroom door, folding her arms and smiling with a face filled with adoration and mischief, Dorothy just about jumped out of her towels. Back on the farm, she was always getting scolded by anyone who had a few years on her. Was Ozma going to scold her too? Was she going to think she was... horror of horrors... *silly in a bad way?*

"Aw shucks Ozma, I swear I was gonna get started soon!!" Dorothy was all aflutter. 
Ozma was quick to stride over and calm her. "There's no rush. We have all day, and all night, and forever, don't we? I just stopped by because I needed to admire you a little." 
"Well shoot, Ozma, talk like that and you're liable to make a girl wanna marry you!", Dorothy exclamated.
"But Dorothy, we ARE married," rejoindered Ozma.
"Watch out, 'cause I'm about to up and double marry you!" tittered Dorothy. 
"Oh no! Double marriage! It'll be hard for me to top that!" Ozma lamented with playful insincerity.
"Ozma, babydoll, I don't think you have a hard time toppin' ANYTHING," Dorothy checkmated. Then she yanked Ozma onto the bed and they both rolled and wrestled around until they could agree upon a truce.

And then there were peaceful sighs. And Ozma remembered a modern popular romantic Ozian ditty and sang it softly in Dorothy's ear. 

"Wherefore do I behold you in warm daylight?
Whence am I blessed to hold you near,
again and again in our always-life?
How very nice.

Asleep in the gem-glow of most-deepest-night.
lit by heavenly cold bright sphere,
O dream-drool cascading paradise slice,
O ever-wife."

And when Dorothy was distracted by thinking that the song was kinda pretty and simple and sweet, Ozma all of a sudden started grabbing the wrestled-down Dorothy on the weak spots on her hip and made her jump and thrash and giggle til the cows came home.

Luckily, the Emerald City had its own little guild of dedicated cowherds, so there was no need for Ozma or Dorothy to take any action regarding the sudden and abrupt bovine homecoming. There was plenty of time for Ozma and Dorothy to become worn out by their teasing and and girlish roughhousing and fall asleep in each other's arms. And by the time Dorothy awoke, unaware that while asleep she had been facially covered in Ozma's lipstick-prints, the very last traces of the day's warm daylight were barely still twinkling in the green glass above.

"Aw dangit! I forgot to get out of bed again!"

Dorothy threw on the nearest piece of gingham she could find and started strolling to the kitchen. Dorothy had already written off the idled-away time and settled on her next adventure: quest for an evening breakfast. 

***