Lucy in Oz

by Gia Lo Scalzo

All day Lucy studied the faces of her co-workers who were assembled for a workshop designed to improve race relations in the school where she worked. An empathetic being by nature (and wired from the coffee and donuts), Lucy rather predictably did not see the risks and fell right into the people around her, thinking all the while of the great Atticus. "This is how I can really know," she reflected. But while trapped temporarily in the chest cavity of a tall, black, raucous security guard named Dizzy John James, Lucy gasped for breath and felt herself slipping, melting, seeing only blue and black and blue again. Her hair was burning at the roots (a sensation that was new to her), and she knew she was invisible, a ghost as pale and thin as a spider web. So she clicked her ruby reds and got the hell out of there as fast as she could, retreating without delay from the sharp glare of Technicolor.

6S

Gia Lo Scalzo is a teacher who lives in a little house in Connecticut that has a deep and overgrown backyard (affectionately known as the "forest") from which she occasionally hears unidentifiable animal noises. Girls from the Bronx are lost (and scared) in the country.