The Life of Dolores Umbridge
One sun-kissed afternoon in northern Mexico, a woman with a swollen belly knelt beside a river. There was no one in sight. No one for miles and miles, just the glinting sand and her own memories. The sickly humid air reminded her unpleasantly of sweat… just like the kind she'd encountered each day in the dimly lit Squib Centro de Recurso.
Cada dia…
They're just trying to help you
Let them…
She had fought to turn a tea kettle into a spoon. A piece of parchment to a slug. Was that so much to ask for? Could God, if indeed he existed, not make her either a witch or a muggle? Free her from the torture that was living in between the two worlds; unable to perform the simplest spells or understand the workings of a muggle blender? Was that too much to ask for?
The woman had never handled frustration well. Her entire life, she had been measured up and judged by her mother's expectations, but had failed her. Every time.
Just take the wand
And then there was him. He'd tried to help her. Even loved her… More than she could hope for anyone to love her squat and pug-like body… Her self-doubt… Her insanity.
Why had he, though? What could he have seen in the pudgy woman who had hung around at the Squib Resource Center?
Had he been drawn to her by fate?
It doesn't matter much now, though, does it?
But there is still the child .This child. Our child.
Mi niña.
The woman looked down at her belly, swollen now to impossible proportions from the vantage point of a highly pregnant woman. Her fingers brushed the grainy surface of a large boulder, trying to support herself.
Waves of dizziness
She fell against the sand while the baby kicked her, punishing her for everything she had done.
Fuego
Todo ido…
All gone
They had deserved it. All of them. Even him. The other women. How many? Their laughter still tore at her ears.
It tore
They laughed
And now her only tie to the world was this child, still unborn. The woman brushed her stubby fingers over her stomach once again. It was hard to get used to the feeling. She'd decided long ago to save her child; grant it the gift she'd never had.
Esperanza
Hope
She leaned against the boulder, her vision blurred by the intense sun. She blacked out on the sand as her baby was born.
Hours later, dusk was setting in, and a child was cradled in the arms of her mother. For ages, she studied the thing, placing it on the ground, picking it up again, waiting for love to overwhelm her.
It did not. Curious. The woman had planned to grant it life. But the thing disgusted her; filled her with revulsion. No motherly feeling was lost on this child.
Is this how I should feel?
She nudged the babe away from her and watched the thing stretch its pudgy, sticky fingers towards the river; reaching for its future… The woman smiled bitterly and laughed, laughed, her eyes glinting cold steel.
"¿ Quieres el rio?" She shrieked at it, more than half-crazed by now.
Do you want the river?
The thing turned from the river and reached for her. Its body was a small image of her own, pudgy and squashed. She shuddered; her eyes latching onto its.
You don't want to live like I have
She saw death in the child's eyes.
It's time.
Regretfully, she forced herself to touch the child, slinging its helpless form across her shoulder, close to her, as she waded deeper into the darkening blue water. She closed her eyes, lay back and allowed the water to take her underwater.
Her fingers no longer clutched her daughter, but it didn't matter.
She was free.
Thirty-seven miles upriver, a town was still burning.
