Don't look at your feet while you're walking, keep your head up in the sky..........
Dorothy walks quickly across the lawn between the overgrown flowerbeds swamped in late summer flowers. A mass of hollyhocks, nasturtiums, delphiniums, gladioli, dahlias and huge multi-coloured lilies.
Within a minute of leaving the kitchen she is out of the garden, through the gate, turns left and along the single street leading out of the village, down the hill towards the sea, with the sound of Bach’s ‘Air on a G string’ floating out through the open window of the house behind her.
Dorothy smiles. Susan is playing Bach on the stereo at high volume. Something she does when she needs to unwind and flow in a graceful dance around the living room until she stretches out on the floor into slow yoga postures.
The clouds from the west that had brought the rain have started to clear. The sun beginning to break through. A warm September afternoon. A few white painted cottages with well kept gardens lie on either side of the road. There is nobody else outside. Saturday afternoon and everyone is either watching television or doing their weekly shopping in Tiverton or Barnstaple.
One or two cars parked on the grass verge by the side of the road. Smoke rising from some of the chimneys.
The road begins to descend steeply out of the village bearing left and then right between high hedgerows already ripe with hips and haws. White elder and blackberry flowers changing to dark purple berries. The signs of the end of summer are everywhere. The year moving again towards autumn.
She strides down the road, behind the hedges to her left are fields where this summer’s wheat has recently been harvested and meadows with a few solitary cows grazing in them. To her right the woodland falls away towards the stream and then up across the steep hillsides to the cliffs. Oaks, sycamore, beech and horse chestnut. A few early leaves beginning to yellow and fall.
All through the year, whenever she visits David and Susan, she walks in this landscape, seeing the changes that nature and the seasons bring. It has always been a mystery to Dorothy why most people would rather live in cities than the far more interesting surroundings of the countryside.
She would only take a walk alone in the city, even at this time of day, if there was a real or pressing need. A girl from her school had recently been attacked and raped only a few yards from her home in what was considered a ‘good’ neighbourhood. She has no illusions about her safety, even in this small village where everyone knows everybody else’s business.
Her mother, Susan and other women had always impressed on her.
“Shit happens. But don’t let it get to you. Always be on your guard. Stay awake.”
That was partly why Joanna had encouraged her to take up martial arts and she had effortlessly achieved great proficiency, though up to now, touch wood (her hand brushing the post of the style she is climbing over) she had never had to use any of it to defend herself.
She and Red were following one of their favourite walks along the path down the valley that runs from the edge of the village to the sea. The trees form a canopy over the track, muddy from the days rain. Dorothy ignores the puddles and the mud, her jeans tucked into her boots, anorak zipped up against the wind from the sea.
At the bottom of the hill the path crosses the stream as the valley widens out into a meadow, often flooded in autumn and spring and still littered with branches that were blown down in last winter’s gales.
From here the path, after crossing the stream by an old rickety wooden bridge, runs along the other side of the valley, dense with trees covered by centuries growth of ivy, moss, lichens and fungi. Oaks that were already fully-grown when smugglers and wreckers had used this pathway on their journeys to and from the coves and cliff tops. Beeches with huge silver grey trunks and crowns of copper golden leaves. Sycamores that are comparatively new arrivals, perhaps the seed helicopters of their ancestors had been carried on some wind from the continent, blown high across the Channel and the Devon moors to land and take root on this wild coast.
All that grows here bending towards the east, bowing in recognition of the power of the west winds from the sea.
This is a walk she has taken many times before. Sometimes alone, often with David or Susan and, when she was younger, with her mother and father. But it was these journeys with Red that she cherished most. No need to talk. No idle comments about scenery or weather, just drinking it all in, breathing in the smells, the sounds of late afternoon, birds and small creatures rustling in the undergrowth. The suns rays through the branches, their patterned shadows falling on last years litter of dead leaves and this years yarrow, cow parsley, foxgloves, bindweed and anemones growing along the banks and in the furrows of the path.
Once they had left the village and begun their descent into the valley Dorothy had started talking to Red. This was no idle chatter. This was real communication. She had no doubt that the cat understood what she said though, up to the present moment, Red had never ventured a spoken reply. However, and this was something she had never told anyone, the creature moving lithely and effortlessly along side her, leaping over puddles, stopping occasionally to listen to some sound from nearby or across the valley, this creature could answer her questions directly and hold a ‘conversation” with her.
She had discovered very soon after their first meeting that Red was capable of transmitting mental images to her. This had come as a shock to her and it had taken a while for her to realise that it was actually happening, that it wasn’t her mind or an overactive imagination. The cat not only understood everything she said but could reply by directly projecting thoughts, pictures or words into Dorothy’s head.
She had also found that, with great concentration, she could do the same. She could achieve this when the two of them were sitting together without any distractions and Dorothy focused all her attention on Red. Quite early in this new method of communication the cat had let Dorothy know that it was easy for her to read Dorothy’s thoughts, but this was something she would not do. In spite of Dorothy’s assurances that “Hey Red it’s fine by me, I’ve got no secrets from you”, the cat had insisted that it was something she would not do. The spoken word was sufficient communication until Dorothy’s powers of thought transmission improved and as far as the cat was concerned Dorothy’s thoughts were her own and should only be eavesdropped on under very exceptional circumstances. She had also indicated that it would be a bad idea to let anyone else know about their ‘conversations’.
Dorothy had realised this for herself before Red had mentioned it to her. Certainly most of her friends and acquaintances at school considered her quite strange enough without her confessing “Hey, I just thought I’d let you all know that I have a telepathic communication with this cat I know in Devon”, though she had been tempted on a couple of occasions to share this with Deborah her only real close friend. But more of that later.
She was sure that Susan and David could be trusted with this information about Red (though whether they would believe her was another matter), however the cat had suggested that it was probably best to let them find out for themselves and she had left it at that. The only other person who shared this secret was her younger cousin Rosa.
The first time Red had ‘spoken’ to her was a few days after the cat’s arrival at the house. The two of them had been sitting in the garden. It was late in the evening and the adults were in the house discussing whether she should return home with her parents or spend a few more days with David and Susan. She had told them all, in no uncertain terms, that it was a much better idea for her to stay in Hartland than go back to London.
“Cmon mum. I’ll just be bored there and you’ll soon want me out the house. I’ll be fine here. Please mum…dad. Go on ….Say yes! I can help Susan finish painting and moving the rest of the stuff in. Honestly I won’t be in the way. It’s different now they’re living here and not just coming down for the weekends. I really want to help. Please !”
The discussion had threatened to turn into an argument between Shaun and Joanna on the lines of it being a bad idea for a ten year old child to be in a house with painting, decorating and structural alterations happening. David and Susan were sure that it wouldn’t be a problem and they would love her to stay.
She had wandered out into the garden frustrated that her wishes didn’t carry as much weight as her father’s belief that she would somehow “…. get in the way. Hey Joanna, be reasonable sweetheart. Remember the time she helped you paper her bedroom and the two of you ended up wrapping wallpaper round the wardrobe?”
In the middle of the lawn grew an old apple tree that had long since stopped producing fruit in any real quantity. Every spring some beautifully scented delicate pink blossoms would appear on it. By autumn there would be half a dozen huge cooking apples, of a variety long lost to the rest of the world, hanging on it and Susan would turn them into a couple of delicious crumbles or pies.
Red had taken to lying under this tree in the evening. It seemed to be her favourite spot in the garden, the reason for this had become apparent to Dorothy at a later date.
She had walked out the back door, kicking her feet along the crazy paving path that led across the overgrown lawn to the tree.
“Huh…Why can’t I stay? I mean….bloody hell…if David and Susan say it’s OK then why not?”
These words out loud hadn’t been addressed to anyone in particular and she hadn’t been aware of the cat sitting under the tree. As she crossed the lawn towards the centre of the garden where the tree grew she saw in the half-light of the fading evening the dark outline of the creature. It’s eyes gazing straight at her. She felt a warm tickling sensation behind her eyes as if something was happening both inside and outside her head at the same time.
She had a clear image of Red’s face and a feeling, not exactly words or even pictures just the implication that if she really wanted to stay maybe she should say so forcefully but reasonably. A suggestion, as if someone was whispering inside her ear, but mixed with a brightly coloured picture.
For a moment Dorothy thought there was somebody else in the garden, one of the kids from the village that she played with from time to time. Robin or Elaine. She looked round but could see, even in the darkening garden, that there was nobody there. She took a couple more paces towards the tree and looked straight at the cat, absolutely still under its branches.
Image of cat. Inside her head. Image of cat affirming that ‘yes it was her who was speaking to Dorothy’. Soothing trickle of sensation. A ‘nothing to be afraid of’ idea. A certain knowledge that what was happening was OK.
Dorothy had shaken her head. Looked around the garden one more time to check that no-one was hiding in the gloom. She walked the last few feet towards the cat and sat down next to her.
Her first thought was that she had imagined it. She was still at that stage where imagination and reality have not yet become separated by the rigid rationale of most adult minds. Her lifeline growing out of childhood but not yet overwhelmed by the intense changes of adolescence. She accepted that something had really happened between her and this strange creature who had appeared in her life only a few days before.
“Did you do that?”
Image of Dorothy and Red together. Warm feelings of friendship and ‘yes I can do that but I’ll stop if you don’t want me to’.
But not quite words. Not as if someone had turned on a CD player or tape deck in her head. Both inside and outside at the same time and easy to understand.
“Is this for real? Can you really do that. Tele…….Telepathy. Like in comics?”
Something like laughter. A tingling sensation that made her smile. Slight confusion about comics. But ‘yes this is definitely for real’. Dorothy knew for certain that this was not in her imagination and that the cat was able to communicate directly with her.
From that evening on she had hundreds if not thousands of ‘conversations’ with her feline friend. She had quickly stopped wondering how it worked, although Red had explained to her in some detail the basic principles of thought transference and a number of other matters about ‘reality’, herself and her presence in Hartland which need not concern us here but which gave Dorothy a very different perspective on the world to that of most girls she knew and most of which she had shared with her cousin Rosa. These explanations and indications did not, at that time, seem to have any connection with the work David and Susan were involved in. It was a subject she had never discussed with Red, she had always assumed that scientific formulae and complex theoretical equations were things that she would have no interest in, though she might have been surprised at how much Red knew and understood of their endeavours.
As they walked through the old wood, still wet from the recent heavy rain, for the first time Dorothy talked to Red about her mother. The wonderful thing about her friendship with this curious creature was that she never prompted her to say more than she wished. Red never tried to pry or extract information from her, everything was allowed to happen at her own pace, in her own time.
“You only met Mum a few times didn’t you Red? She was great. I wish you’d got to know her better. Such a smart woman. I bet she would have let you talk to her. What did you think of her?”
Images of occasions when Red and her mother had met. Moving snapshots. Seen from the ground. In the garden. In Susan’s house. Different times of year. Sky and flowers behind her. Her mum’s smiling face. Soft hands stroking. The smell of cooking. The scent of fresh-cut grass. Strength and determination. A powerful and creative mind.
“You’re right there. She was smart alright and she was the only one from her family who got out of Newcastle. I think she got some kind of scholarship to university. She came from a really rough part of the city called…..what was it called?”
A sweep of dockland and huge factories. Rows and rows of terraced houses built on steep hillsides leading down to a wide river with bridges carrying trains and cars. Smoke and noise and yellow buses. Pubs with men drinking a brown ale. Women in kitchens. Large families. Kids playing out in back lanes on summer evenings. Then a single word:
‘Scotswood’.
“You know it? Have you been there Red?”
Yes. Just passing through.
“Me too. I only visited it once. I think I was about five or six. Mum took me to see my relatives. It was awful…….not the place itself. Actually I liked it. It had a real energy to it and I had a good time. Met my cousins….one of them was called Sharon. She was a bit older than me with lots of curly tangled black hair and a great laugh. We got on really well together. They lived in this small house in Scotswood, Sharon and her mum and dad, who were my uncle and aunt I suppose, and her two brothers and a sister I think or maybe there were…..anyway everyone in the family wanted to see my mum. It had been years since she’d last been home. My granddad was dead and….. I’m not boring you am I?”
Eyes intense with interest. Images of the city that she recognises. As if Red needs to know more. Go on I’m listening.
“I didn’t meet my grandma. She was in hospital. I think she was dying. My mum went to see her with my aunties and the rest of the family. The difficult part of it all was that they thought she was so special, my mum I mean. She’d got out you see, gone to Cambridge, to university and then became a research scientist. Became someone. They felt they were trapped, just ordinary people living in a northern city out on the edge of the country. They were really proud of it though, proud of being what they called Geordies. From Newcastle. I loved the way they said it. New Caasssle. My cousins all spoke with a strong accent and thought I talked really strange. Posh they called it. I suppose it was with me being from the south, a totally different way of speaking. Anyway my mum couldn’t stand it. I think she felt they were the lucky ones, not her. They still had each other, some sort of real identity that she felt she’d lost and couldn’t have back again. She argued with them all the time. I don’t know what it was about, I guess I was just too young to really understand what was going on. I think it was something to do with politics….or religion….or what to do about my grandma… they called her nanna…maybe they just argued about what programmes they wanted to watch on the telly. I don’t know. It got so bad that in the end that we left. We were going to stay for two weeks but we were only there for one. I remember my mum crying at the railway station. Her sister, my auntie Donna, she took us there in her beat up old car. My auntie Karen wouldn’t come to see us off. I remember my mum and auntie Donna saying how they wished Kevin was still alive. He was their brother….my uncle. But I never met him …..he was killed in a war somewhere ..Korea or Vietnam I think. Missing in action she said but they never found his body. My mum said it was just his luck to be one of the only British sailors to be killed in a war thousands of miles away between the Americans and the Communists. I think she had really liked him. He was her only real brother. David’s her half brother…or maybe he’s her step brother…..I’m not exactly sure. Hey Red, I’m doing all the talking, not giving you any space to…..”
A torrent of words. A big black cat with bright yellow eyes surrounded by thoughts, feelings and images. All that she had swamped Red with pouring back over her and then…….clear and bright, a single picture.
The deck of a ship. A huge flat expanse with planes in the background. Planes with their wings folded . A bright blue sky with open sea and a few waves in the distance. Intense heat and, looking straight at her, a young man with short dark hair in a faded blue denim shirt with HMS Ark Royal embroidered in simple yellow letters on the shoulder. Smiling. Good looking. Cheeky face. Just like….
“Red! That’s him. My Uncle Kevin! . How do you know him?”
The mental equivalent of a shrug of feline shoulders. Kind of just one of those things.
“Did you meet him?”
No. A definite negative.
“So how do you know what he looked like? That was him allright. I’ve seen pictures that mum had. Everyone said how much he looked like her. He looked older just then. Show me again!”
By now they had reached the point in their walk where the path crossed the stream and took them through the meadow to the wood at the other side that continued down the valley to the cliff tops and the sea beyond. As the path came down the hill towards the stream the woodland ended abruptly at the edge of the meadow. It was a walk of about 200 yards alongside the stream then across the bridge, through long grass, cowslips, dandelions, vetch and cow parsley growing in the lush wet field before they regained the thick cover of trees on the other side.
The bridge that they were about to cross was not exactly a major feat of structural engineering or aesthetic design. It was purely functional. 2 thick planks, probably of oak or beech, lashed together, side by side, and laid across the stream between the two banks. Worn by boots, rain and floodwater. An upright at either end with a handrail joining them down one side of the double span of rough wood.
The winter and spring floods washed it away at least twice a year but it never travelled further than the stone road bridge a few hundred yards down stream where the planks would get wedged under the single arch and some local farmer would pull them out once the floodwater level had dropped. The bridge would be reinstalled, sometimes in a slightly different location, where it would stand until the next flood washed it away again.
This was Dorothy’s favourite part of the walk, particularly at this time of day, at this time of year. The sun was starting to fall towards the far end of the valley, beginning it’s descent into the sea and the west. It always reminded her of a song that Joanna used to sing in that smoky voice of hers based on an old jazz blues twelve bar.
There were more verses but she couldn’t always remember them, it was those lines in the chorus that the walk at this time always evoked. She turned to Red and asked her one more time
“Red. Please. Show me him again. I’ve got to….”
She stopped in mid sentence. Stood still on the middle of the bridge. Red balanced gracefully on the handrail beside her. The stream rushing past below them, excited by the rain that had recently fallen. Rushing over sand, stones and pebbles, carrying twigs, leaves, plastic bottles and other debris down to the sea. Singing its song of longing.
It wasn’t the sound of the water that had made her stay nor anything that Red had told her or shown her of Kevin. The cat too had heard it, coming from the other side of the meadow.
Somewhere at the edge of the wood someone was whistling. A tune that Dorothy new so well. Someone was whistling the melody to the song that her mother had sung.
Dorothy froze. Transfixed by confusion and exhilaration.
The words to the song echoing in her head as the melody drifted across the meadow towards them.
“Red! It’s my mum. She’s there. In the wood!”
A questioning. An uncertainty. An image of……not her mother.
“It must be. Who else round here knows that song. Come on”
She runs. As fast as she has ever run.
Long shot of Dorothy and Red running through the long wet grass.
The cat taking two or three strides and then rising high in the air in single bounds over the grass. Landing smoothly and then repeating this effortless and muscular move. Dorothy’s hair streaming behind her. Panting with excitement.
Close shot of her face.
Her eye’s searching ahead of her as she moves across the field towards the edge of the wood. A blur of grass, feet, paws. The cat’s face set in a grin. Dorothy’s jeans and anorak wet with the drops off the long grass underfoot.
Red reaches the edge of the meadow a few seconds before Dorothy. There is a fence. A mix of wire , upright posts and pieces of wood interwoven to form a strong solid barrier topped with barbed wire. The cows that graze this field have been known to break through the fence to browse amongst the fresh grass and leaves in the trees on the other side. Once into the woods they follow the path to the cliffs and over the edge to the rocks hundred of feet below. An expensive accident for the farmer who owns them. So the fence is strengthened every year to prevent these costly accidents, making it virtually impossible to climb over without getting caught on barbed wire and tearing clothes and skin.
At the other end of the fence is a style. Red and Dorothy rapidly cross the edge of the field and move along the fence. Dorothy stumbles a couple of times on the tussocks of thick couch grass that grow by it. They soon reach the style.
Wait. An image of Red. Attentive. Listening carefully. Sounds she can hear.
Birdsong. Thrush, starling, a meadowlark and some martins high above them. The rooks over the top of the hill. The stream rushing under the stone bridge. The wind from the sea. A car in the distance leaving the village. A tractor somewhere. No whistling. It’s stopped.
They stand together by the style. Straining to hear it again.
Nothing.
“I heard it. Someone was whistling that tune. Mum used to call it Coltrane Blue. I’d know it anywhere”
Someone’s here. Just up the path.
The cat’s eyes can make out the shape of a woman standing in the shadows cast by the oak trees , a few yards into the wood where the path starts again.
She has her back to them. She is looking away from them down the track that runs straight through the avenue of trunks and branches for nearly half a mile before it reaches the cliffs. In the distance Dorothy can see the large wooden gate onto the road before it crosses the arch of the stone bridge.
The sun breaking through the canopy of late summer leaves, the smoky light silhouettes the woman’s figure. For a moment she is certain the woman is her mother. She is about to cry “MUM!”
No. It’s not her.
Red’s thought is absolutely clear. Certainty.
A picture of her mother. Fading. Then, for an instant, a bright image of someone else. So fast. Dorothy doesn’t quite catch it. Just a glimpse. Someone………
The woman turns. Dorothy is almost over the style. Her right foot on the top step, her left foot on it’s way down on the other side.
No. It’s not her. A moment’s intense disappointment. She had been so certain…..But it doesn’t matter. The woman smiles at Dorothy. Her face warm and radiant. The sunlight catching her blonde hair.
“Hello. I didn’t hear you coming. I was watching that squirrel”
She points to a branch high above their heads.
“Look there she goes. Getting ready for winter.”
The squirrel, busy collecting nuts, pauses for a moment to look down at them. Dorothy, the stranger and Red staring up through the branches. For an instant Dorothy feels as if the whole scene is frozen. Encapsulated in time, caught in amber or glass. Then it breaks. The squirrel lets out a high pitched chatter, dashes along the branch, leaps across to the trunk of the next oak and disappears round the back.
“I thought you were someone else….I mean….this is my friend”
For a moment confused, slightly embarrassed. Not knowing quite what to say.
Dorothy looks down, expecting to see Red standing next to her, beside the stile. But she is not there. She turns and looks back over the fence.
“Red! Red!”
“She’s here”
A mental purr of such strength as Dorothy has never felt before. Complete contentment.
She looks round to see the stranger standing with Red in her arms. Gently stroking her and whispering in her ears. Tickling her under the chin.
She is amazed. Shocked. No-one has ever been able to treat Red like that. Occasionally she will let Dorothy stroke her or roll over and have her tummy rubbed, but to pick her up is impossible. Dorothy has the strong impression that Red has actually jumped into this stranger’s arms. She shivers, pulls her anorak around her, even though the wind has dropped and the evening is warm. For a moment an unbidden thought crosses his mind.
“Witch”.
“Your friend seems to have taken a liking to me. As if she knows me. Greeting an old friend.”
Dorothy comes off the style and walks towards the stranger.
"The Last Witch of Devon. Just what the hell is going on here."
“Red. What’re you doing?”
A happy cat. A purring cat. A cat in clover.
Dorothy laughs out loud. She has never had such cat like thoughts off her friend.
“Are you a witch?”
The woman laughs. Their laughter blends and floats up through the branches above the leaves, into the evening sky.
“No. I’m not a witch. Though there were or maybe there still are witches round here..... or so I’ve been told”
Dorothy stands in front of her. Studying her closely. The stranger returns her stare, unembarrassed, continuing to stroke Red, whose eyes are almost closed. A totally happy pussycat.
The shadows cast by the leaves and branches fall across the stranger’s face. A face of startling beauty, framed by her hair, so blonde it’s almost white, carelessly falling to her shoulders, moving in the gentle wind that carries leaves from the trees to rest on the woodland floor. She is dressed in an off white trench-coat belted at the waist, one epaulette torn and hanging by a single button off the shoulder of the coat, a bright red cotton scarf loosely wrapped round her neck and tucked into the coat. Blue jeans and a pair of scruffy trainers that might once have been yellow or possibly white. A small light brown rucksack slung over her right shoulder. High cheekbones. Skin tanned as if she has spent a lot of time outdoors in wind and sun……maybe she’s Spanish….or Italian
Her eyes are blue, a bright intense azure that is almost too much to gaze into. Her lips moist and wide, not quite perfectly proportioned. Dorothy wonders how old she is. At first glance she had thought she might be in her late twenties but the more she looks at her, the longer she studies her face, it’s outline shadowed and illuminated by the light behind her, the less certain she is of the stranger’s age. A flash of light through her hair catches Dorothy’s attention.
A pair of stud earrings that glint in the light. For an instant she feels that she would like to study them closer, move towards her and gaze into them, touch her earlobes, find out what small stones could give out so much light.
The woman stands still. Relaxed. Waiting for Dorothy to finish examining her. Her eyes fixed on Dorothy’s face, reading the lines, looking for signs….
“Which way are you walking?”
The stranger breaks the stillness with her question.
Dorothy has been staring at her for a long time. Minutes have passed between them in silence, only the sound of the wind through leaves, branches, long grass and now for the first time the distant waves of the sea echoing up the path towards them.
“We were going that way. Towards the cliffs”
She points down the avenue of trees. The sun has broken through the clouds and hangs, an orange and red ball caught in the branches of oak, beech and sycamore.
“So am I. Do you mind if I walk with you?”
“Of course not. Perhaps….I mean…I’ve never seen you round here before… I was wondering where…”
“Where I came from?”
“Something like that”
The stranger laughs, strokes Red one more time and then, without effort, the cat leaps from her arms and lands lightly at Dorothy’s feet, purring loudly.
“Good we can walk together to the cliffs . You ask me questions and, if I can, I’ll answer them”
She crosses the space between them and links arms with Dorothy like old friends. For the first time Dorothy realises that her companion speaks English with an accent. So she is foreign.
A laugh. A warm bubbling sensation in her mind. Red. Foreign. Another laugh. A flash of landscape, sky, clouds and….what the hell was that? No place like any other she’d seen, no place on….
She looks down at her friend. The cat stares up at her. Innocently. The stranger’s eyes on her as well. As if the two of them knew something. A conspiracy. No, not quite that. A shared understanding. Dorothy feels no threat. The conspiracy, if there is one, is not against her, rather about her. As Dorothy stands there, she feels that this scene, this woman, this cat and this place has a resonance of some other meeting, some other person not quite herself. For a second the frame holds and then the woman smiles at her and speaks again.
“Don’t worry. You’ll be fine with us. Shall we take a look at the sea?”
With Red running beside them, they walk together along the wide pathway towards the cliffs. The sun falling in front of them. Whisps of smoke from a bonfire on the cliff-top drift towards them, diffracting shafts of its rays that reflect from the puddles in the tractor ruts on the path, glinting with rainbow radiance off the earrings of Dorothy’s new friend.
Pull out from mid shot of Dorothy, Blue and Red to slow track back and widen shot to include trees and sky as the 3 walk away from camera and out of shot down path.
Dissolve to black with a few bars of Coltrane Blue music fading in & out.