Evolution

Evolution

By Pogrebin

1. 1941: Eloquence

"Slytherin!"

The rough fabric of the hat against his skin and a sick feeling in his stomach, walking weak-kneed to the edge of the table without really seeing.

"Parseltongue."

The password giving him a thrill of excitement, like he's part of some sort of clandestine organisation, just like the Secret Seven but with magic.

"Wingardium Leviosa!"

A breathless excitement in his tone, a pink flush--> creeping over young cheeks as the feather floats, movements jerky but created by him him him, and it's almost like he doesn't have a wand. It is simply Tom and the feather, floating, high up, higher until he's vertiginous and nauseated, but he keeps whispering the words to himself because they make his mouth crackle.

"...."

Strangely enough, these words aren't the ones he will remember most when he grows older and comes to forget everything but a few snapshot images of each year-- quickly, in colour and a burst of sound like badly-edited film.

He remembers the feel of the glass snake cages under his fingers when he sneaks out at night. Watching the snakes writhe over and under and through each other, fix him with an unblinking gaze which softens as his mouth opens wide. Crisp air rushing in and filling it with sibilant hisses that knock against his back teeth and make his tongue feel sharp and slitted.

2. 1942: Aestheticism

Tom likes parentheses.

When words are trapped (between them), they assume a breath of their own within the life of the sentence. It is a cordoning off, a cessation of infection, enforced quarantine by ink that stops words from bleeding out (to meet others). With one careful black mark, he could change a meaning, tangible because it was tacked to white crisp paper.

There is an effeminate beauty in a semicolon -- the way its name rolls off the tongue and then, so simply, places itself on the paper like an afterthought. Exclamation points are harsh and stubborn, ending the sentence with the thrill of electricity, a crude emphasis unlike the sibilant persuasion of a comma that means pause and then continue, wrapped with a voice that has no edges.

3. 1943: Megalomania

I do not see

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

And so, commandments and predictions, still dripping wet from the scrying pool that was scattered with a few chicken feathers. The aftertaste of Ceylon tea that preceded the omens which lay clumped at the bottom of the cup like mashed-up noodle alphabets in a bowl of tomato soup. A sign in the twist of the oak tree's branch that portends illness for those (Gryffindors) he dislikes--clinically, from afar, as if afraid of catching their disease.

(Gryffindors) In brackets, so as not to infect the others.

The fact that he can speak Parseltongue is absolute proof that he belongs, and perhaps when he has sat there long enough in that stuffy classroom, tired and unfocused, he will see Salazar Slytherin's face staring back at him from a clump of tea leaves, or distorted by the spherical perfection of a crystal ball, or in the twist of orange peel in a pewter bowl of water.

The sense of finality, and of this is the way things are to be, in the slick Crucio. And aftermath: shrieks of roosters that have to be silenced using hands, like swish and flick, with the satisfying snap of bone afterward.

4. 1944: Superiority

Seers are a vulgar thrust of colour in the night like a wet dream, waking up breathy and spent, covers crumpled on the floor. No more of that. Potions Masters detest the silly wand waving, the verbal excrescence which obscures the magic from the man in syllables and dialogue.

Tom detests them all, who could not perform magic without the clumsy movement of their mouths or bodies, like sex: knocking together, gasping, mewling. Cheap, like the white shine of bleached teeth.

Simply thought--

No movement of the wrist, like performing a charm. No performing, just Tom and magic, old like the blood in his veins.

And words with no ink.

Coming unglued from their anchor at his command and then floating back, languorously laying themselves down on white sheets in streams of uninterrupted syntax. Later: taking notes in Transfiguration with a dry quill, watching words with no ink appear on the parchment and then handing in the essay to Dumbledore with a smile that flashes as gold as his Prefect badge.

5. 1945: Genesis

A schism. Like giving birth: pain.

(Soul into words on the pages of a Muggle diary from Vauxhall Road.)

A splitting of perfection.

Indeed, the perfection cracks and splinters. In the diary, thought is words with ink, and in the real world, Tom wakes, breathy and spent.

6. 1981: Darwinism

A flash of green light.

A scar for the baby.

And for the other:

The realisation that without the clumsy mouth and hands, there is no thought but self-validation, spirit wrapping itself around I -- there is no strength for more. In disembodiment is voicelessness.

There is a vacuum, and pages of a diary seal the gap.

Words without ink curl onto the blank page. The playful points of a semicolon and the delicate curve of a bracket are an invisible smile.

*