Motion Picture

Motion Picture

Ginny didn't understand why she did it. There wasn't a rhyme, a reason, any hidden vestige of a plot, but deep down there was a morbid satisfaction from it.

'Once upon a time is such a cliché.'

It was her vice, like Hermione's insomnia diaries or Draco's nightmare sheet music. It was her get by, it was the same thing as her mother's cooking or Luna's mystic smiles as she takes photographs of mundane places and makes them nouns.

'Hermione smokes like a cinematic goddess.'

Sometimes it just happened and she reached around frantically for whatever she could find to write on. No napkin, bookmark, tampon wrapper, business card, or bare section of thigh was safe. She'd taken to wearing her hair with an assortment of pens and quills nested in it, just so she'd always have weapons for her battles at the ready.

'For fuck's sake! His name is Jack Bryce and he's a human.'

When she was just beginning Hermione had sat next to her and passed her newly sharpened pencils just before the old snapped. Hermione had given her caffeine and wine, a blanket and a hand to hold.

'God walks up to the microphone, the coffeehouse has never rocked so hard.'

Now she doesn't need Hermione, but she likes for the older girl to be around just incase she pens something truly profound by mistake, which doesn't actually happen very often.

'Hold me gently while I fall.'

Ginny doesn't care where the magic happens. Last night she sat in a rustic window seat overlooking the back weed garden that no one has claimed vice to yet and stared at the tumbleweeds out of the corner of her eye. But the morning before she'd been coming out of the loo and had to attack a roll of toilet tissue before Draco walked by and took pity on her, offering her a hand and a notepad.

For hours at a time she can go off food and drink as long as she has her blood--her writing. It is magic unto itself, the words rolling out from under her pen, the scratch of her scrawl on the parchment, the philosophy of the simple narrative, and the way her breath hitched in her stomach when she knew she could finally stop.

'The End is like saying Christmas in July.'

There was a portfolio under her bed, locked with tape. Inside there were poems and prose, there were rants and diatribes about other people, love letters and suicide notices, coffeehouse sonnets, and then there were the quotes that said it all.

For Harry she had written A Black Tie Affair.

'We are all betrothed to death.'

For Draco she'd laid out the gospel of spycraft.

'See no evil. Speak no evil. Hear no evil. There is still evil.'

To Hermione she'd explained the art of love.

'Her eyes are ringed in charcoal, pulled from the heart of the fire.'

As a last memoir she'd written a postcard to Sirius.

'Aloha.'

Not that she'd ever shown any of them their epitaphs. One day she would, probably, but somehow she never felt right intruding upon their individual brooding.

'Leave me to my pain, I want to die in peace.'

Or maybe she was selfish. After all, little Ginny Weasley could do something none of them could. She'd never saved the world, never plunged a knife through her father's back, never fallen for an enemy other than Poe perhaps, and never died, but she still held a different deck of cards.

'Then came along the prince of spades, carrying a half eaten box of chocolates and roses he'd yanked from the royal garden on the way up the drive.'

Little Ginny Weasley could tell a story.

'I am prone to adjective. Big ones nobody but Hermione encounters, and only then in books. Anything can be shattering, especially a kiss.'

She could paint with adjectives and gossip in verbs, she could leap tall buildings with a dip of her quill, she could see the world from a thousand different perspectives, but at the same time still witness everything through that infamous grain of sand.

'Point in reference; Sir William Blake.'

It was a dark job, being the narrator through the pain and war, but somebody had to do it with a metaphor at hand. A comparison to make everything seem so much more removed from reality.

'The princess called herself Pandora.'

As the hourglasses spun Ginny let her notebooks collect in corners. She spent a lot of time during the school year writing out soliloquies for the people too broken to cry, to disheartened to scream, and too strong to break.

'When we were broken we were beyond young and too old to be gray.'

To Ron there was an excerpt from Hamlet.

For Draco there was the prologue to Romeo and Juliet.

'Oxymorons get me every time.'

On Christmas she mailed her mother an extension on Queen Mab.

'Little baby sister, stuck up in the tower, silent screams of hers that no one hears.'

Only for Harry could she find no decent Shakespearean reference to rewrite.

'This is the grain of reality I'm going against here, the cuffs of conformity I'm trying to break. This is not an easy task.'

Time slowed when she sat in class and rapped her quill on the desk, longing to take it and stab it into her teachers so she could escape and write something of real meaning. But Ginny couldn't, wouldn't, do that, she'd been watered down by her writing, alarmingly mellowed.

'My heart is on my sleeve. Dear God won't you sing for me?'

After the first attack on the school she started carrying her vice around with her everywhere, venting her stress in the back of every class, often earning herself no more than a disapproving glance. The teachers understood when they found the shredded bits of paper littering their back floors like drugged confetti.

'Invisibility is an interesting concept...'

Just before her brother's graduation everything changed. War changes everything. She sat, sixteen years old, in the middle of an ended battle with a template to scribe what she saw even though she had long lost her sense of color. Hermione held Harry as he died, her tears mingling with the rain splashing off his cracked glasses. Seventeen years old and she was losing her last best friend.

'A wise man goes prophet, a good man goes lame, the quiet are crazy, and you are not unchanged.'

In the end all they could give him was freedom.

'On Monday they just get tired and walk through a slit in the apocalypse.'

At the end of days Ron was 'Alpha' and Harry was 'Omega', just two words on gravestones.

'I walk in the shadows of giants.'

One white rose was all the symbolism Ginny could spare as she watched Draco hold Hermione up.

'Silence is never golden, but sometimes it is welcome.'

Molly said nothing when Ginny didn't return to school, traveling to every hillside by foot to see something to write about, to hopefully write something that would sooth some of what she had seen, what she had done.

'I am up at dawn to see the mist rise off the grass as it is growing back from it's fertilization with blood.'

As she grew older, but not necessarily up or out, she found collections of her incandescent writings in newspapers, in sermons, they were on bulletin boards, in graffiti, and they were in hearts.

'We were here, we were there, skipping past the reflecting pool, me and you skipping school.'

Around her, her vice was everywhere, it was everything, every time, everyday, every way, and every breath. People never stopped her except to say thanks and buy her a pint, Hermione just smiled from the eves, and though the world broke out in color when she saw somebody reading her scribbles Ginny was still just a girl with a pen and broken heart.

'Everyone is no longer a good comparison. Everyone is dead.'

It was bittersweet, but when she was writing, that was when the magic began.

'What exactly is a cinema?'