ngl sh
P t n v n s
S pt mb r ,
Petunia Evans looked down in surprise at her homework. Signing her name at the top of the page as usual, she had been looking at the grammar exercises in her English book, more concerned with answering the questions than with heading her paper.
Apparently, heading her paper was harder than she thought.
She tried filling in the letter E at the beginning of English. The pen made a little smear of ink, then nothing. She tried again. Nothing. Experimentally, she tried writing a random sentence: "I am a fish."
It came out, " m f sh."
She tried writing the number 7. Nothing.
The pen wasn't dying. The ink on the page was heavy and black. She wrote a large uppercase P. The ink flowed freely, thick and strong. She tried finishing her name.
P t n .
She topped her invisible i with a thick black dot.
Frowning, Petunia took a look at the pen itself. It looked like an ordinary ballpoint pen with a company label on the side…
H gw rts Sch l f W tchcr ft nd W z rdry
The Y at the end of "Wizardry" was flashing like a digital clock after a power outage.
Petunia threw the pen to the floor.
"Lily," she grumbled. Lily and those horrid boys she went to school with were about to get a very angry letter.
And she was going to write it in pencil.
Postscript-style disclaimer: I don't own ze Harry Potter. Although I wouldn't mind owning Severus Snape...
I've got to stop falling for potentially evil men. But they're just more fun that way.
As for why I wrote this one...I write everything in my notebooks and then type it later. I change pens every time I change pages--just one of my little quirks. I was typing up "Night of the Scarecrow" just now (you'll be seeing this one later, those of you who follow my Batman stuff) and I came to a page I had written with a pen that had gloriously thick, dark, heavy black ink. Only, sometimes it didn't. This pen liked to fight me, you see, and every so often the ink flow would just stop, giving me a line so thin and light it was hardly readable. Quite annoying while I'm writing, but apparently on this page I was really in the groove, so I never went back to fix it. Reading over it, I was struck by the rather odd realization that the ink flow died on almost every A I wrote, as well as a few Es, Is, Os, one U, half of a Y, and a C, for some reason.
So I took a few minutes to write this random little fic, which I think is actually shorter than its explanation...
And, in case you're curious, I typed it directly into the computer. For once, no pens involved.