Elphie: A Wicked Childhood

You plant two sunflower seeds in a pot of rich soil. You water them with the same can, at the same time, with the same portions. You rotate the pot daily so they get equal access to the sunlight. Yet on some early, pertinent day, perhaps there is a cloud across the sky, and the plant on the left doesn’t get quite the strength of light that the one on the right does. Or there is a worm in the soil in one quadrant of the pot who eats through more of these roots here than those ones there. Who can say. Sisters are not flowers. And parents can never, from the first day, give the same water and light and soil to one girl that they gave to her sister. Sisters grow, if they grow together at all, in adjacent sorrow.

The past promises us nothing but this: it will abandon us. Leave us orphaned. Unless we abandon it first.

Maybe it doesn’t matter how we’re made, in the end; it matters only who we are.

The other thing Elphie finds out, perhaps as important, is that knowledge comes to her without it needing to know what she looks like. Knowledge doesn't care about that. And in erecting for herself this tentative scaffolding of new skills, she discovers that she's losing her ability, or her need, to squirm with that awkward sense of not-right-ness, not-enoughness...The answer establishes itself despite her.

It has become Nessa's toy, her only toy, but of course the younger girl can't play with it, unless you count kicking a doll something of a game. The figure is as immobile as Nessa herself. They deserve each other, Elphie had thought when she finished hating it enough to pass it down to Nessa.

you don’t need your father’s permission to notice what you notice. There’s liberty enough in owning your own eyes, girl.

Everyone’s got a pretty little flaw hidden behind the party smile and the better shoes.

For Idina Menzel and for Cynthia Erivo and for all the Elphabas, past and to come

Few Quadlings choose to pass the time of day with us. We spook them. And they spook us. But you seem different. Maybe you’re deranged?

she’s full of all the things there are no words for

maybe it doesn't matter how we're made. in the end, it matters only who we are

So Shell takes to mayhem with talent and a precision so quickly honed as to seem divinely given. If the Unnamed God don't want me to break the latches in that goat pen, why do I get the idea to do it? The goats don't mind. I'm a liberator, Papa. He never needs to say that, though. The goats go running wild, ruining scores of gardens in an afternoon. No one has seen Shell at the goat paddock. Maybe the gate has just broken open? No, the knife-sliced strips in the bark show ill intent.

She can't remember laughing at anyone other than a family member before. It feels full, and it feels mean. Both of these sensations are gratifying.

Elphie opens her mouth and closes it again. It will not happen often in her life. She will rarely be able to ignore the urge to motor through any given moment with as much commotion as focus.

Frexspar the Godly: A tall man, especially compared to old-stock Munchkinland farmers, those barrelly folk whose chins rarely grow four feet above the soil.

A green child in a green green world. Maybe green is as invisible to her as concepts of time, gravity, justice.