Eyes of Thunder
Part 3: Minerva Writes Poems
By Nyx [nyxfics@hotmail.com]
A/N: *READ THIS!* This part is from McGonagall's perspective. *READ THIS!*
See Nyx. See Nyx screw with timelines. Well, I'm pulling a Mena on you and saying that McGonagall is just a leetle beet - well, about ten years older than MWPP. That makes her... oh, forty or fifty. I don't care if JK says she's a "sprightly seventy," I've already messed Ginny up, so why not McGonagall?
Disclaimer: I am she and she is me and we are all together. Not mine. Some of it's J.K.R.'s, some of it's Sandra Cisneros's. OC's and story line are (c) Nyx 2000. Mangling of German is my fault.
Ratings: PG-13. HP/The House On Mango Street crossover.
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Love is not love unless love is vulnerable. - Theodore Roethke
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Banana Split-tilpS ananaB
Red hair, hazel eyes, just the color of tea with honey. I open the door with the mask off and I can tell that she's surprised - frightened? - at the fact that my feelings are showing so plainly. She mutters something. Very well then, I say, and she's inside my quarters, sitting down. The cushions on the armchair are plush, velveteen, luxurious, and I wish she hadn't sat there. My chair! My place!
I know something's happening, she whispers in a low steady voice that reminds me of another girl I once knew. Happening to you. To all of us, but I think that she's really just meaning me, not saying what she means. Professor, one part of me says, and the other fights back and says Minerva, and I can feel the battle raging within me, the battle between me and other-me, the two parts of myself. But somehow my feet shuffle through the shag rug and my legs bend and I sit. My mouth opens - tongue I burnt, with the cloying taste of too-rich hot cocoa - and I begin to speak, and I am transported. Back. Back in time to places I thought had been destroyed and ground into dust as fine as that that blows outside.
But they have not. Or why would they live in my memory?
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American Woman
Minerva used to write poems. I can say that Minerva used to because I'm not Minerva now am I? Only... no. Used to. But Minerva's dead now.
Living on Mango Street, watching Angel Vargas fall off the roof and not caring. Getting hit, what do I do, only nobody could tell me. Just me and the husband, the kids, two kids. Pancake dinner, I remember, and spaghetti lunch, because spaghetti's cheap. Cheap in money, we were poor. Poor in love and money. Poor in what matters, but I never knew. Kids grew up bad, husband was gone, didn't come back again one day and I was glad. Records and shoes had gone out the door and never came back in, never made me black-and-blue again.
No job, no money, no family, just three hungry mouths and rent to pay. Moved into the little red house and left again, couldn't stay there, no way, no how. So we sit on the sidewalk, penny cup in hand, penny for the poor, penny for the homeless, I'll work for you, I went up to seventh grade!
And then the man came, the man I didn't want to trust because he was a man. Stopped in front of me, just sudden, head turned all surprised. Why are you just sitting there? he asked me. You shouldn't be. What could I do but leave the kids at the little red house again and go with him, always worried, always frightened. But the question was die which way? So of course I couldn't not. And the man wasn't like the husband anyway, no, he was tall. Eyes that sparkled bright bright blue like the neon of a sign, hair as long as mine or longer and white, a funny air of being dressed up not dressed when he walked by in those jeans.
The wall opened, scared me even more I remember, but I was just a little girl. So little, not ready for the kids, not ready for life, just sixteen and worried. Don't cry, he said, and I didn't somehow. Just... didn't. And I was safe, I knew, and even when he took me far away I wasn't afraid anymore because he reminded me of Bumpa when I was a baby and Bumpa wouldn't do something bad to me. And my name was different, Minerva McGonagall, not Peréz, McGonagall like the Irish or something from across the sea. I'm not Minerva anymore, I told the man. I'm McGonagall. And he smiled and called me that, like you say the name of a baby.
The rain was falling on Chicago when I left, not left on a plane, left in a fireplace. The sun was shining in England when I came.
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Smiles
Smiles are different everywhere. They say everyone smiles in the same language, but they don't, they don't. There's smirks and half-smiles and they're all perfect and perfectly different. I don't know what you meant when you smiled at me, Professor Grolier, I don't. The smile was not in my language. Tell me, please, tell me - I want to know, I want to know so badly because I'm afraid that it's important. That it's so important.
I should know, Professor Grolier. You're making me back into sixteen and frightened. No, I've never heard of the Daily Prophet, I said, and they all laughed but I didn't know why. You're smiling in a different language, they talk in a different language. So quiet, still, but I can feel the laughter in me. Laughter, ripping at me, laughter. I'm like a boggart. Laughter and smiles.
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Prophetess Sybil
How old are you, she asked me when I first met her. How old are you? Eighteen I told her. Eighteen, in my first year of college, isn't that normal?
Her eyes were big and stared at me. I remember being scared, like she could see right through me. I'm Sybil, she said. I'm eighteen too. You're older than eighteen, you look like it, you feel like it. You're forty at least.
No, I'm eighteen.
Forty, she told me confidently, little big-eyed girl, looked so fragile next to the big black trains. I know. You've got two kids, little kids you abandoned, and I punched her so hard she couldn't stop crying. Just cried and cried, eye turning black, just like mine did.
I'm not Minerva Peréz, I told her, I'm not. You're not, she said right back. Not Minerva Peréz! No! Not! But you're always yourself, she whispered quiet-like. I couldn't say anything, not nothing at all. Running, I remember running away from her, she wouldn't tell the Muggle police who I was, praise magic.
Sybil saw me again today, wanting what Ginny told me, but Ginny didn't tell me at all. I know what about Professor Grolier, she told me, and I wanted to know, but I just thinned my mouth into that little white line and denied anything she asked. Ginny was here, she said, and I couldn't tell a lie, but what did Ginny say? And that's my own buisness, thank you. Did you know that she - ? Only by then I had packed Sybil out the door and I didn't have to mind anymore, just sit there and wonder.
Professor Grolier. What could she know?
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The Rain Dance
Rain dances in puddles. It does, really, and the noise is murmuring-soft. Music.
A ripple flows across the surface of the water softly, almost as though it were afraid to break something. Little ripples, only filling the whole puddle because of so many.
Life is made of little ripples, little things that add up to bigger things, bigger things that add up to the biggest of all. And the rain flows down and washes the earth and the sun returns to make the seeds grow and the seeds drink the water of the rain and die and replenish the soil and their water runs down to the oceans and all is right in the world, I once read, and it sticks in my mind now.
I wonder where that first-grade teacher is who read that to me. I wonder if the ripples have caught up to her yet, because they're starting to catch up to me, and I'm not sure that I want to be swept into the rain dance. And the rain flows down and washes the earth and the sun returns to make the seeds grow and the seeds drink the water of the rain and die and replenish the soil and their water runs down to the oceans and all is right in the world. The rain dance continues outside my window, the wide wide window I made when I first came here, the window that opens onto the rising sun. You can't see the sunrise this morning. It's too cloudy, but you know the sun is there.
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Praying Mantis Eats Her Mate
Splash like the rain, I remember the blood that filled the bath, falling off the sides, a waterfall only redder. The magical bubbles hovering over the body, keeping vigil, looking down with their filmy eyes and brilliant stare. And the face, the pretty face, the beautiful wholesome pretty face that had the milk-white eyes. Eyes that rolled back in her head, looking at something nobody else can see.
Slowly she began to eat herself, I know. Manta Cummings, with the auburn hair that has turned black and thick like solid blood. Green Slytherin wraps around her arms covered scars that were deeper than they seemed. Should've known, should've known, should've known before now!
She began to eat herself because of secrets, the long secret, the secret that one can never ever really keep. Secret birth. Her parents were Muggles and that won't do, will never do, can't do, not in Slytherin - even though Tom Riddle, yes, even though, he was always worse than Manta but better in many many ways. I remember Tom.
Manta has long stripes of open, never fully healed, just bare in the darkened room. Clotted over, just barely; water seeping in, distending the arms. They're a little puffy underwater and I can't touch them.
I won't.
I can't think about Manta, about her livingness and lovingness and dyingness that are all encapsulated in this moment. Manta naked in the bath, the bloodbath. And perhaps this was her beginning as well as her end.
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Day of Dreamers
Sundays are dreamersdays, day for church, day for a broad smile up to the sky that you don't know about. Nobody knows about the sky. But it's a dreamersday and I'm dreaming today, just like you are, just like everyone is.
Sailing, sailing, over the deep blue sea! Anjy is the loudest most bubbly person I have ever had the misfortune to meet, singing around the school on this dreamersday, but I don't know why I don't like it. After all she's only a kid, only a little little kid with double-pierced ears and a nose ring and a punkish glare that doesn't combine well with her personality at all.
I remember that I once used to be like that, that I used to be the little ghetto girl. Not exactly like, no, not perfect: nothing's perfect, and nobody. But Anjy and I are alike in more ways that she knows, more ways than she's ever thought about. But who am I kidding? I'm just her Transfigurations teacher. We're both different things on the inside and out - I was so poor, so low, so desperate, but with a mind I never had cared to use; she's the dangerous black leather rocker, yet she's always so happy and it shines through no matter what she's doing.
Dreamersday Sundays. Sonntag. It's the day of dreamers and I know that Anjy and I are both dreamers, because how else can she be so happy all the time? There's just not enough to be happy with in the regular world. And today I'm dreaming of Manta and Anjy and all the little girls who are so much like I was or not like at all, and dreaming of tomorrow. And of my lost ones, the ones I had to leave behind. And of the little red house and Esperanza.
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Großen Zaubererbuch
It's a big book and it knows it; I snap at it as it grows heavier and heavier under my hands. Stop that, book, I tell it. You aren't that heavy. Just stop it. And it stops, like a little whipped puppy, all of a sudden light in my arms. Well, be that way then, just make sure I can carry you, okay? And it's heavy again. Figures, I suppose. Books that are intelligent don't usually like people that much; they're jealous of their knowlege and want to keep it for themselves alone.
I drop the book thankfully on the table, then seat myself and flip through it from back to front, heading for the "G" section. Gysech, Gxen, Gruen... Grolier. The pages are thin and rip easily; I almost don't want to touch them.
Grolier, Sarah. That's all it says. From all the wizards in the world there is only one Grolier, Sarah Grolier... and it's not the good professor. She's Nereida. Nereida... and I know, all of a sudden, what I had maybe sort of thought before. Fingers flying, quick quick quick, mind whirling, but then a sort of peace. I'm a little bit closer to being dead than I was yesterday, I think to myself, and then I don't think at all, just flip.
Peréz, Minerva
Peréz, Nereida
The entry is small and unassuming in the tiny print, but it seems to jump out at me among all the other Perézes in the list. Nereida. How many Nereidas are there, how many Nereida Perézes? And how many... Nereida Groliers? There are no Nereida Groliers because she never was, she was running away just like me, but she was worse off... all alone, my baby, my girl...
I can't do anything. I can't change the past. I can't take her with me way back then. I cry and cry and cry on the thin paper pages, the ink running a little, the names slowly getting washed away. There is no more Minerva Peréz. There is no more Nereida Peréz. There is no more... no more... the big book, the book that told me something... she knew all along, so why didn't she ever tell me...
We both want to put the past behind us, just as far as it can be. I won't ask. I don't even really want to know. She once was my daughter but now she is not; I gave her up long ago - my mind did anyway yet my heart screams and the tears fall in a steady rythym. The past is gone. It is dust. And I will not remember it; I will be myself again.
I carefully close the book on the wet page and put it back on the shelf. It only takes a second to cast the mask spell, and with a stern face I walk out of my study. I am now Minerva McGonagall.
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finis 3/?
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List of Vingettes:
Banana Split - tilpS ananaB
American Woman
Smiles
Prophetess Sybil
The Rain Dance
Praying Mantis Eats Her Mate
Day of Dreamers
Großen Zaubererbuch
Notes on text: Großen Zaubererbuch means "Big Sorcerer Book." Very rough translation, and I really hope it means that, 'cuz it would be embarrassing if it didn't.