Selcouth: strange; uncommon
March 17, 1991
Harry didn't know what time it was. His cupboard was always dark, no matter what time of day, and more often than not cold and dampish this time of year as the melting snow and driving rain edged into the outside wall. He tried to listen for sounds of his aunt and uncle moving around in the kitchen or upstairs, but sleep still clung heavily to his thoughts, and he couldn't tell if he had imagined noises or not.
The air had a scent of clamminess in it, but his blankets were warm and he burrowed into them, drifting, staring up at the underside of the stairs. A small spider crawled its way along the backside of a step. Harry could just make it out by the miniscule light that came in under his door from the kitchen. But it seemed to have overstretched its abilities (perhaps it was a young spider, Harry thought dazedly) because just as the nearly-transparent wisp of a creature was over his face, its gossamer cobweb snapped and sent it plummeting through the darkness.
On instinct, Harry put his hands over his face, expecting to feel a feathery scampering as the spider fled back to its home out of sight. But it never came. After a moment, he peaked through his fingers. Maybe he was dreaming because the spider hung suspended in midair a few inches above his nose, waving its pale legs in a rather helpless gesture. Harry couldn't see any string holding it up.
He moved his hands and the spider moved to. Very gently, with a constant buffer of several inches of air between his palm and the bug, Harry pushed the spider back up to the ceiling of his cupboard. As soon as it made contact with the wood, it scampered away.
Strange, Harry thought. His arms fell limply to his sides and he turned over to bury his face in his pillow. It was the sort of thing Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia wouldn't like. They would call it unnatural. Most people couldn't move things around without touching them.
Harry turned his eye to squint at the swirl of dust visible near the crack at the bottom of the door. Dreamily, he reached out a hand and drew a smiley face in midair. His fingers were several inches from the dust cloud, but a smiley face appeared in it anyway. Somewhere Harry knew most people couldn't do that, but here in the dark, half-awake, it seemed as easy as tugging on a balloon string and watching it bob. He couldn't fathom how other people couldn't make things like that happen. It seemed like one of the most natural things in the world. In fact, he was sure other people could do it, too.
A/N: Well I guess I didn't have as much to do as I thought I did. Harry doesn't seem to try to do magic from what I can gather from the books, not the way Lily does with the swing and the flower. But I figure he must have had some control of it if he wasn't so afraid of what his aunt and uncle would do if they caught him at it. He seemed pretty convinced in Sorcerer's Stone that he didn't really make strange things happen, but I figure he could just chalk stuff like this up to a dream or not a real memory. Eh, what did you think of it in general (or in detail, I like that too :D)?