A Yard Sale
Of this he was one hundred percent certain: his room had never looked more pitiful. It drooped drunkenly, reeking of dust and dirt and the screaming of the resident ghoul, who gnashed his teeth and rattled the rust from the maze of pipes in the attic. Ronald Billius Weasley stood furious in his doorway: he was furious with his mum, furious with his dad, furious with his brothers, and furious with himself.
"Why is everything I own rubbish?" moaned Ron, striking the door bitterly with his fists, splattered sunlight igniting in his fiery hair. "I'll have nothing but junk and dust to sell at my yard sale, and what prat would buy from me?"
"No one, that's who."
Ginny's voice floated loftily from the hall, and suddenly Ron realized that he had stupidly forgotten to be furious with his sister.
"Clear off!" roared Ron, the ferocity of his voice shaking trickles of dust from the bowels of the crooked ceiling. Ginny's giggles rolled away as she scampered off, pattering and rabbit-like. A groan slipped from Ron's lips as his knees crumpled onto the floor and the floor crumpled into nothingness. At least that was what he wished would happen.
There's no one more pathetic than I am, cried his anguished brain, willing his useless body to sink into the wood as his scrunched eyelids drooped with shameful tears. I can't even have a yard sale without selling everything I own. It's all rubbish anyway. No one would know the difference.
Shadows pooled around his sneakers. Shafts of dancing light shivered through the leaves and shimmered with dust. Above his head the ghoul wailed. The wind sighed and so did Ron, rumpling his hair and running an exasperated hand down his face. Raising his body like a corpse from its grave, he dragged his feet and plunged his hand into one of his long-forgotten drawers.
I might as well try, his brain lamented. It's not like I'm going to have anything else to do. Maybe I could fool some random bloke into buying that wad of used tissues. Could earn me a few Knuts.
"Brilliant. Great job of cheering me up, you stupid, rotten brain."
The clear light of the next morning left Ron standing in front of the Burrow like a lone pillar, a scruffy table of his odds and ends brooding under his nose. He blew, casting around his eyes for no particular reason. The sun glared daggers deep into his back. The clouds stared. Even the surrounding woodland was laughing with light. Spectacular. Just spectacular.
No one will ever buy this rubbish, moaned his brain. Bloody hell; who am I kidding? A dragon turd is more valuable than my whole cruddy house.
He shifted from foot to foot, rocking awkwardly to and fro. Chirps of the birds assaulted his ears. The breeze sent whispers through the forest. The grass twinkled bright with dew. And still he was more alone than before.
"Bloody hell."
He hadn't even realized how truly beaten and forlorn his goods were until his desperate eyes happened upon them. There was his old pet cage, twisted into a pitiful mess that reeked of something terrible. Ron's body was racked with a sudden icy shiver; Scabbers used to sleep in that cage on the nights when he wasn't curled up tenderly against Ron's warm chest. Sure, Ron had always loathed Scabbers to the greatest possible extent, but he had been devastated all the same when he had discovered that his beloved pet rat was actually the disguised form of Peter Pettergrew, the wretch who had sold Harry Potter's parents to their untimely demise. His teeth tearing blood from his lower lip, Ron snatched up the cage and heaved it under his table, something empty throbbing from deep within him.
On his table there were also two lonely fragments of splintered wood, both huddling in the watery sunlight. These were the two halves of his old, shattered wizard's wand, the one that he'd snapped stupidly while attempting to stop a decrepit flying car from slamming into a tree (the Whomping Willow, for heaven's sake). His insides were flooded with a sudden rush of blind terror at that memory, his fist crushing the wand's remains into the flesh of his palm. Glass shattering like ice. Metal smashed in with the harshest, most unearthly of sounds. Engine howling. The sky careening over their heads and then rumbling back under their feet. He hoped with all his might that Harry had forgiven him for that incident; it had been his stupid idea, after all. Eyes wandering, he felt the small pieces of wand slide into the pocket of his jeans. He found that he couldn't even comprehend what he'd just done.
Could this really be all that he had?
Utterly pathetic, spewed his brain, utterly pathetic.
Ron eyed a jumble of t-shirts and jeans, the ones that he'd outgrown over the course of a single month. After a few failed attempts to fold them properly, he simply seized their folds and lumped them into another, slightly less mountainous mass. His lanky limbs always hung farther than they were supposed to. Already he felt as if he stood gawkily taller than the sky.
A stained pack of Exploding Snap and a set of wizard's chess later, Ron was left with nothing but an utterly naked table slumping before him like a dizzying expanse of wasteland. There he stood, blinking in the shade. The trees stood proudly alongside him. Clutched in his hand was a crumple of parchment, which even despite its small size was cramped with a hoard of painfully minuscule scrawl. It was the scrawl of a certain Hermione Granger. He knew not why it had been shoved in a pair of his old slacks. He knew not even how he'd managed to get his hands on one of Hermione's Potions essays in the first place. He only knew that he had just located his most precious possession. His teeth shredding his lips, he squeezed the parchment in his desperate fist, dampening the paper with sticky blots of perspiration. And then he found himself striding back across the twinkling lawn, parchment in hand, his sneakers glistening with dew and the sun shattering over his head. There was nothing left. He truly had nothing left to sell.