Unexplained

Unexplained

When our children consort with the unexplained, you take them from us; you take them and teach them, slowly, surely, how to take the mysterious, the mystical, the unknown and weave it into certainty; teach them, with waving hands and pointing fingers, about cause and effect and how one tiny step can send a chain reaction swirling down into blackness. You teach them to turn our sofas into turtles, and to make our potted plants tap-dance around our living-rooms, and to creep up behind us and turn our teacups into rats, or our saucers into starfish.

But you teach them also, subtly, insidiously, teach them to mock their parents, poor Mother, poor Father, teach them in their minds to laugh at us and pity us - the pity of the fortunate, a smirking, self-satisfied joy in the misfortune of another - teach them quietly to feel in their hearts that we are inferior, teach them to call us Muggles, that somehow demeaning word-which-is-not-a-word.

We know it; we watch, helpless, as you steal our children from us and give us nothing but air and empty goodwill in return; we watch as our children grow apart from us and immerse themselves in your maddening, chaotic, incomprehensible universe, watch them awkwardly introduce us to their friends, watch the looks of confusion that flit across faces when they say that we are dentists or doctors or bankers or lawyers, watch those looks vanish, to be replaced with dawning comprehension - "Ah, so you're Muggles!"

We answer your fascinated questions, we play host to your ephemeral whims and fancies, but we cannot help but wonder: what would you do in our place? Would you watch your world spiral down, helpless, as your children slip, slide, glide away?

We know, too, we know you and your kind. We have watched your wars as outsiders, listening as our sons and daughters tell us how many of their friends have died today. We are in awe, sometimes, of you, we fear you, but we know that those who soar high fall hard, we know that your maniacs are more bloodthirsty, your dictators better able to mow down innocents with one twitch of a finger. You have power that you cannot control; it is like a flame that you believe tamed, until all of a sudden it flares out in some defiant display, in the hand of some man or another, and each time there are fewer left to mourn.

We know your kind, and we know the life we have consigned our children to: a life of a perpetual, half-felt feeling of inferiority, a subtle sense of impurity in glances and voices and gestures.

Do you remember, perhaps, a fifteen-year-old girl who died this summer? They found her body and her parents' lying on their carpet, along with the six-week-old baby's, and green light floating above her house.

She was a witch. Her parents were not.

We know that by letting you take our sons and our daughters, we are sentencing them to exile and death, but can we deny it? We cannot stop you from having them, for though there are few of you, you can harm us in ways we could never have imagined if we had not seen your newspapers or listened to our children home from school. We must let go of them, watch them go where we cannot follow, and we cannot prevent it.

We give you our daughters, we give you our sons, and you use them as pawns in some great hungry power-game of yours, and in the end only we are left to pick up the pieces.