When Harry finally gets around to telling them about Voldemort,
his red eyes and high-pitched voice,
Hermione has them over during the hols and shows them Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
After that Harry is never so scared again, at least not
of the way he looks.
And Hermione
thinks for the first time of a universal solvent for magic
and since that's all that's holding Voldemort together
when Harry pulls out the super soaker from under his cloak
and blasts him
he falls apart into a sodden lump of bone and flesh
soaked in Harry's blood.
She never admits to Snape where she got the idea.

Only Ron takes away nothing, too entranced by the dancing pictures
to follow the plot.

------------------------------------

Nothing gets thrown out at Hogwarts. The house-elves squeeze the pumpkin juice
fresh every day;
the pulp and rinds
are dried and pressed into bricks to shore up the crumbling foundation
or fed to Hagrid's beasts. Pumpkin seeds sometimes sprout in the manure,
or vines grow up from the basement
crumbling the walls further.

"Some day," Professor Sprout thinks, "The vines will win and Hogwarts
will belong to the plants again."

She doesn't know
whether she'd be glad or not.


------------------------------------

Flick and Swish

Flitwick falls on the first of February
a fact Fudge says in full seriousness at the memorial service
and is surprised when the audience snickers.
They can't help it, all the Fs,
picturing the small fellow sputtering
although his actual death, of course
is no laughing matter,
suffocated,
a fistful of feathers stuffed down his throat
when the Death Eater children
finally showed themselves.
They finished with Flitwick;
they started with Sinistra, pushed her off her tower
to the icy flagstones below. Fudge gets her
name wrong when he reads them off.

------------------------------------

Badge of Courage

The addition of the gryphon tears
would have been harmless, were it not for
the spilled squid ink and the bogie
Neville had dropped in in a moment of inattention.

The resulting conflagration
left him without much of a nose to speak of
which Snape considered justice
although Madame Pomfrey though she might eventually grow it back.

Meanwhile, he wears a nose made of silver
like Tycho Brahe; it has ironically made him
more handsome and more daring.
Snape hopes his bladder will burst during one of Dumbledore's speeches.

------------------------------------

Draco in January

When Draco finally leaves
Dumbledore is waiting on the steps
with a copy of his transcript
just like he was any other student
leaving to seek employment.

Draco knows
that Dumbledore knows
that he is leaving to join Voldemort
and so the transcript is pointless at best.

What Dumbledore doesn't know
is that Draco is fleeing so that he doesn't have to witness
what the other young Death Eaters have planned for the teaching staff,
and the list of teachers' names on his transcript
breaks his heart.


------------------------------------

Because of the sniper in Maryland, my
children were afraid to go to school.
"It's just like in Harry Potter," I
told them, "Before Voldemort fell.
People were afraid but they kept on
with their daily lives. We can, too."

I don't think this is actually true, that James
kissed Harry and was in at the bank on time
(or the Ministry or whatever).
I picture them cooped up in the Welsh cottage
snapping at each other,
the diaper bin in the corner taking over the room
with its overflow, and Lily too afraid her wand would be detected
to cast an odor-dispelling charm.

"Voldemort killed Harry's parents," my
children point out, and cling to me even harder.
So maybe it was a bad comparison;
we don't even live in Maryland, and also
there's no magical baby whose forehead
will reflect a bullet.

Back