A Prohibition Against Sodomy and Sapphism

I turned the page and read…I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are the no men present? Do you promise me that behind that curtain over there the figure of Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women, you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—“Chloe liked Olivia…” Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women. –Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929

Hurriedly, Hermione ransacks her bookshelf for any books even remotely related to spontaneous wound healing:

The Indispensable Medi-Witch’s Desk Reference
HDM CDXX: A Healer’s Diagnostic Manual
A Compendium of Episkeuo-Based Healing Spells
Magical Medical Anomalies
A Complete Squib’s Guide to First-Aid

And, in sum, everything but the Bible. Although, now that she considers it, Jesus did heal the sick without the assistance of a wand. She has a pet theory that Jesus was a wizard. Honestly, any first year could transfigure water into wine, and walking on water could be as simple as a wingardium leviosa, and feeding five hundred people with five loaves of bread and two fish—well, that’s just a rather tedious repetition of the geminio charm. And what happened to Jesus?—he has a religion devoted to him. No wonder the ministry is so strict about performing magic in front of muggles—any first-year drop-out could turn a badger into a happy meal and become the next messiah. (Though from what she’s read about McDonald’s sanitary policies, some unscrupulous food processors performed that very same feat without becoming messiahs.)

Anyway, if she were to perform a torquere on the American president in order that his head literally contorts its way into his rectum, then maybe she could become a prophet and start a new religion based on tolerance, respect, humility and peace. Then again, as she recalls, Jesus preached the same ideas, and judging by the actions of his more prominent followers, the tolerance and peace turned into genocide, inquisition and war. No, Hermione wouldn’t like that at all.

And how in God’s name did she get on about the Bible? Oh, healing. Right.

Not bothering to lug the pile of tomes to her desk, she sits cross-legged on the floor in the midst of the volumes.

She picks up The Indispensable Medi-Witch’s Desk Reference first. (As opposed to the “Disposable” Medi-Witch’s Desk Reference, of course. If the house is burning down, save the desk reference before the children.) With difficulty, she opens the dusty book covers, scanning the table of contents for anything related to wounds.

Chapter I: Artifact Accidents

Chapter II: Creature-Induced Injuries

Chapter III: Magical Bugs

Chapter IV: Potion and Plant Poisoning

Chapter V: Spell Damage

Nothing seems to quite fit her enquiry, so she pulls her wand from the drawer (noticing a palpable sense of physical relief, somewhere between a sleep-deprived person taking a shot of expresso, and a stoner taking a hit of cannabis.)

Holding her wand over the tome she intones, “quaero wounds.” With startling speed, the pages flutter through half of the book before settling on a section entitled

“The manifolde woundes acquired of magicalle creetures and theire divers treetementes.”

Hermione hates archaic spelling. Before Ben Johnson standardized the English language, elaborate spelling was a sort of status symbol among foppish, aristocratic dandies. That and sodomy. Why can’t they have normal status symbols, like…sports utility vehicles or giant houses with no back yards? At least those don’t hamper her attempts at comprehension.

“Tunk” she says, tapping the page.

The black font of “wounds” turns red a few lines into the page.

“Tunk.” A red highlight a few millimeters down the page.

“Tunk.” The page turns, highlighting “woundes acquired of werewolves”

“Damn it.” She mutters, wondering at how many times the word “wounds” occurs in the book.

“Duco wounds.”

The red “wounds”, “woundes” (and even the adventurous “whoondesse”) waft up from the pages translucent as smoke. They join together on a single plane, as if printed on a page—and the list is as long as she is…

“Shit.”

Her bedroom door swings open—panicked, she looks to her mother’s gaping eyes. Of course, she can’t quite meet them, as Mrs. Granger’s gaze is riveted to the smoky cloud of red letters suspended mid-air between herself and her daughter.

A sharp shot of adrenaline sets Hermione’s heart palpitating audible as a metronome click-clacking on presto. Oddly, she feels as if she’s been caught doing something naughty with a boy.

“Sorry, dear,” she says hastily, backing out of the room.

Her parents are understanding. Well…they try. Really hard. For the first six years, it was as if she had been selected to enter some prestigious preparatory school. Not much of a stretch, as she had had her heart set on Dollar Academy as a young girl, so she probably would have attended a boarding school anyway. Back then she wanted to be Prime Minister when she grew up. So things were normal. She would spend the hols with her parents, they would of course have nothing to talk about, and shortly thereafter she would return to her distant public school world. Then she came of age and…it hasn’t been quite the same. There’s no rule against performing magic in the house. They would never do that. But Mum spilled hot tea down her front when Hermione first performed a scourgify on that evening’s dishes. Hermione offered to use the spell to clean it off and to soothe the burn, but her mom nervously stammered that aloe vera would be quite sufficient. And she didn’t mean to emphasize it that way, because there are things you think and things you say, and that was not something Mum would say. So now, with the magic, it’s as if she went to Hogwarts and came back with—with a girlfriend—

“Oh—CUNT!” she curses the worst curse word buried in her lexicon. And then she laughs at the half-realized irony, but not a laugh of mirth, heavens no, that pained kind of stuttering laugh one uses to defuse something devastating. The kind of laugh you laugh because you don’t want to scream or cry or screamandcry.

“Hermione? Something wrong?” Mrs. Granger has been standing outside of the door the entire time, and rationally, Hermione knows that it’s because she’s waiting for Hermione to invite her back in, but she feels so bloody intruded upon.

“I’m fine,” she snaps.

She can hear shuffling outside of the door and finally the sad footfalls of her mother traversing the hallway. Immediately, Hermione feels ashamed. She hasn’t been short with Mum since she was little, and it must be painful, especially now. God, she can be such an ingrate sometimes. Mum and Dad have bent over backward to accommodate her—she’s an adult right now, she should be at university, not an in-home dependent of her parents. Well, she’d love to be at university right now—it’s not her fault that the wizarding world has collapsed into anarchy. But she should be there—that’s her home. She should be fighting!—not kissing girls in graveyards.

…had they kissed? No…no they hadn’t. Becks touched her, but Hermione didn’t do anything. She should have told her to stop, but she’d been paralyzed. She’d heard about this. It’s a biological freeze response. The same thing that immobilizes someone in the path of charging elephants prevented her from halting Becks’s advances. That’s it. But she’d liked it. She’d begged for more. Maybe it was just part of Becks’s fantasy, but it had the net effect of preventing any moral disassociation on Hermione’s part. She…liked it.

Well, she’d never been touched that way. If Ron had touched her that way, then she would have responded the same way. An open-eye image of Ron touching her deftly, lightly—but that’s where the fantasy cracks. Ron couldn’t touch her softly. Boys couldn’t touch her softly—not without making her feel patronized—like some fragile whisp of porcelain liable to shatter. Damn it! The tactile memory of soft hands running down her back so smooth she can feel the delicate grooves of her fingerprints, it makes her stomach coil tight as a snake. But that’s not really her stomach. It’s low and warm and makes her crotch uncomfortably aware of itself. Damn it!

This is so—INCONVENIENT!

And she can’t even talk to Ron about it. Ron!—where is Ron!? He’s an adult, a man now, and yet he lets his parents control his life. She couldn’t find him if she wanted to. It’s been months and still no word. He could be dead for all she knows.

A brief picture of Ron invades her mind—arms folded stiffly across his chest and undersized dress robes confining his body, tight and leaving his wrists and socks bare. Eyes fused shut, permanent and waxy. Do wizards embalm? She wishes they don’t. There’s just something…dysfunctional about muggle burials. Like it’s some kind of desperate attempt to make the dead look…not dead. As if they were just taking a long nap, but you’ll see them when they wake up. Most people can’t face death in its starkness. The realization that people are meat and you’re not laying your loved ones to a pleasant rest—you’re planting them in the ground to be devoured by detritovores. And when someone dies, we all take stock, examining our moral inventories. Like a bill at the end of life, wondering if, in the end, you’ve come out even. But we rarely do an even amount of right by anyone. Not even ourselves.

And Ron—after all the years of denial, jealousy, bickering, and wanting and dreaming and fantasizing…she’s realized that the wanting had been so much more thrilling than the having. In his room, the first time that her body was his for more than a tentative, stolen second…but of course that had been mediated by some sense of propriety and pacing.

So we’re together now.

Yes. Yes we are.

It had been the twelfth time he’d said it that day and she felt bad forcing that smile of “genuine surprise and elation.” Ron could be so insipid sometimes.

“I’m bored. Let’s do something.”

“All right. Would you like to take a walk?”

“No way. I’m tired.”

“Ok then, how about we…get some dinner?”

“’m not hungry.”

“I can—er—read to you?”

“That’s boring.”

Honestly, Ron could be so insipid when there were no battles to fight. At least they gave him something to do. Some people are just so convinced that it is the duty of others to entertain them that they find it impossible to enjoy themselves. Ron, unfortunately, revealed himself to be of that ilk. Maybe Hermione had deluded herself, maybe he was an unimaginative oaf. A good friend. But an unimaginative oaf. A mommy’s boy. Someone who was so dull that she couldn’t enjoy herself because she was so conscious of his enjoyment (or lack thereof). Also, what she could not have predicted, is that in this particular instant, the lackadaisical attitude was…not calculated, but…for once he had something on his mind. Ron was sitting on his bed, Hermione in a creaky old desk chair opposite. Probably a ministry cast-off brought home by Arthur.

“Hey, could you sit over here?”

She’s leery, but she can’t come up with a solid objection. “Erm, all right.”

She sits on the opposite side of the bed. He fidgets for a moment. Probably had been expecting her to sit next to him. He scoots closer, doing it quickly so that perhaps it will escape her notice. Very smooth, Ronald.

“’Mione?”

“Yes, Ronald?”

She turns half-way, and his face is millimeters from hers. Apparently, she hadn’t turned close enough for a kiss, so he jerks her face the full distance with his thumb and forefinger. It hurts her neck. He’s oblivious. Must think he’s taking a lesson from Don Juan himself. And then he kisses her. Mouth too wide, engulfing her mouth and nose, and she has to exhale sharply to keep his saliva from running down her nasal passages.

She breaks free.

“Ronald!?”

“’Mione!”

Their tones are decisively asymmetrical, but Ron hasn’t detected that. He wants her to want it. Confirmation bias. He embraces her, too rough and too tight and she knows that he’s fumblingly trying to imitate the passionate love scenes in movies, the last seconds before the camera pans to the window curtains.

He dead weights, and the paralyzing mass of him forces her backward onto the bed. And she can’t scream, because his big soggy lips are sealing her mouth. And worst, she feels the bluntness of an erection rudely poking her stomach, like some obnoxious person agitating for her attention.

And he’s trying to unzip his trousers—that’s when the paralysis wanes and adrenaline courses caustic through her blood.

She tosses her head until her mouth is sufficiently free to scream, “Stop it!” And sufficiently frees her left leg to knee him in the bollocks.

He’s so mortified that he pauses stiff as a wire-hanger over her, mouth open and drool glistening down his chin, and then he begins to cry.

She squirms out partially from under him, turning him over and she tries to extricate herself from his convulsing limbs.

--And that’s when Molly Weasley throws open the door.

“What are you doing to my son!?” she screams.

In retrospect, Hermione was on top of Ron, who was crying with his trousers open, so what else was Molly to think? And Ron was either too injured or too disinclined to speak up in her defense.

Disgusted with the whole mess, and practically shaking with indignation, Hermione grabs her wand and apparatus home. It’s very rude to apparate without saying goodbye. With the same discourteous force of slamming the door in someone’s face, but another moment in that room and she would have been screaming.

And that’s the last time she saw Ron. The next day, Molly sent her a howler politely informing her that they would be going into hiding and it would be unsafe for her to try to contact Ron.

Unsafe for whom?

And she couldn’t get back. Diagon Alley was sealed.

The spot where her leg had been lacerated twinges. It’s somewhat painful. Tender almost. Tentatively, she touches the patch of pristine skin overlaying the pain, and to her consternation, the spot is tender to the touch.

Suddenly, she feels overwhelmed. There’s too many problems on her mind and she’s powerless to anything about them. Drawing her legs up, she huddles in a tight ball amid the pile of books. She feels the inertia of spiraling—of a hole in her resolve widening and widening and bursting and flooding.

Hold on now, she’s Hermione-bloody-Granger, and she does not despair over personal issues. She is a problem-solver, not a catastrophizer, and if nothing else, there is one problem over which she has control. She may never see Ron again, she may live the rest of her life in the muggle world, but right now there is a girl. And it seems so big, because she can’t even whittle that down to a problem, but maybe her over-developed cerebral cortex is contriving to create a problem where none exists. Maybe the crystal simplicity is just that. Simple.

She wants. Everything else has excluded her.

--She must speak to Becks.

She grabs her wand. Any muggle problem can be solved with a wand. She bounds down the stairs, leg tingling slightly. But it’s barely more than a tickle, as if something fibrous were squirming under her skin. This increases her agitation. Yes, she’s agitated. The kind of agitated where you’ve lost something and you can’t breathe evenly until you’ve found it.

“Hi Mum,” she says, anxiety arching the pitch of her voice, making her sound manically sunny.

Mrs. Granger looks more concerned than she would had Hermione descended the stairs to start a shouting-match. At least she’d been expecting that. But this sudden change in Hermione’s demeanor must be awfully worrisome.

“Are—“ she hesitates “—you looking for something?”

Hermione tears through the cupboards. Under the sink. Over the refrigerator. But she can’t find it. And of course, she’s got her wand in her hand, perilously twirling in Hermione’s nervous fingers as she rummages through the kitchen.

“Yes, I’m looking for the mug, er, the English listing service. When one is looking for someone they look in the...”

“Yellow pages, darling?”

“Yes!” Hermione’s head pokes out from behind a cabinet.

“Accio yellow pages!”

A loud crash sounds from the office, a lamp smashes in the living room and Mrs. Granger turns just in time for the thick tome to whiz past her ear, hurtling toward Hermione.

Hermione squeaks out a startled Aresto momentum, and the book falls impotently to the tiled floor.

Mrs. Granger is livid. “Hermione! Can you please show some consideration for the other people living in this house?”

“I—I’m sorry,” she stammers, trying desperately to say something apologetic, but far too frantic with her preceding problem to come up with anything compelling.

“That’s not enough. Give me…that!” She can’t bring herself to call it a wand, eschewing it like some dirty word. She’s tolerant, but naming it would lend more credibility to its reality than she’s ready to permit. No parents are perfect.

“But Mum, I…I didn’t mean…I…”

“No, I’m sorry, Hermione, but you’ve shown multiple times that you have no respect for anyone else in this house. I’m dealing with this, too, all right? And it’s not easy, and I’ve been doing my best, but it’s been a lot for me to take in.” Hermione’s angry, but there’s some validity to what her mother’s saying.

“Yes Mum.” She stretches out her holly wand, mind scrolling through everything she’s losing with the wand, but they really all fall under the roof of one real loss. Mrs. Granger shakily reaches out, pauses inches short, fear warping her face—

“Put it in the silverware drawer,” Mum says, deadly quiet.

“But it might get scratched!” Hermione protests.

“Put it in the drawer!” she screams shrilly, and Hermione’s startled into compliance. She opens the drawer, carefully placing her wand behind the plastic silverware tray. The moment it leaves her fingers, she feels lackadaisical. Like she will never enjoy life again and any happiness she’s had before was purely illusory. She looks at the window, half-expecting the ragged edge of a dementor’s robe to flit past the glass.

But the explanation it much more banal. Depression is more palpable than metaphor this time.

She picks up the yellow pages. It is rather heavy. Without looking up, she edges around her mother. The climb upstairs is laborious. Her feet sink into the stairs with each step.

Opening her door, she sighs at the mess she’s made, knowing that she’s going to have to organize it without the aid of a wand. She doubts she can lift some of these books. Maybe Dad will help her. It will make him feel relevant.

She climbs over the books, like so many loose boulders, and takes a seat on her bed. She opens the yellow pages, and thankfully, the pages seem to be in alphabetical order. She was afraid that she would need to perform a qaero spell to find Becks. Then again, Muggles use these every day without the aid of a wand, so there must have been some system of organization.

She flips to the “C’s” for “Crossman”, but she can’t find her anywhere between “Cross Country Shipping” and “CR Plumbing.” Actually, the yellow pages seems only to list businesses. Unbelieving, she re-checks the page. “Cross Acupuncture and Herbs”, “Cross-Country Express Mortgage” “Crosspoint Advisors”…

Her eyes swell, and her head begins to throb. Suddenly the room feels crowded and hot. Mum must have misunderstood.

—But she had asked about finding someone. Surely, there must be a way to find a private citizen.

She flips through the pages, noticing that the first section of the book is composed of a white section of pages. Opening there, she’s relieved to find listings of people. Surely enough, there’s “Crossman”…three pages of Crossmans. Must be common she notes absently.

She comes to the B’s, but finds no “Becks.” Well, of course Becks must be short for something. She tries “Rebecca” with no luck. “Bethany”—no. She has similar luck with “Elizabeth” and “Bellinda.”

And what if she’s not even listed under her own name? She lives in her parents’ household, so she might be listed under one of their names.

Hermione knows the spell to find her. It’s a simple locator spell, and you don’t even need a proper name to use it. But now she doesn’t have her wand…

“Shit,” she blurts. Crookshanks stretches his orange paws, then curls back up to sleep. Hermione feels inexplicably angry at him for his languor. She pushes him, trying to nudge him off the bed, he retaliates by hissing, and viciously scratching her forearm. “Stupid cat!” she yells, grabbing a pillow and shoving Crookshanks off the bed. He claws ineffectively at the pillow as she pushes him. She then opens the door, pushing him out with the toe of her shoe, and though she’s not prone to anthropomorphizing, Crookshanks seems more than happy to quit her stormy presence.

Not wanting to alert the household to her distress, she tightens every nerve in her body to prevent herself from slamming the door. Oh, how she’d love the noise and the violence of it. She feels like she can’t move about without breaking something. She just has so much pressure and energy in her body.

Hermione paces, eyes fixed on the yellow pages, as if her body were simply pivoting around her gaze. Her leg spasms, making her stumble to her knees. Must be the anxiety. She needs to calm herself.

She considers reading, watching BBC News, but she can’t imagine being distracted. All she can see is the agitation of her loss compounded with the frustration of being unable to distract herself. She pictures herself in front of the telly, Simon McCoy relating the story of genocide in some obscure developing nation, and her in a glass box crowded with desires, not taking any of it in. It reminds her of a poem about Brueghel’s painting “The Fall of Icarus” about how suffering happens when everyone else is absorbed in their own lives. How we as individuals so easily turn away from others’ tragedy.

And it frightens her because when she first read it she was angry at the farmer and the ship’s captain for ignoring Icarus’s fall, but for the first time she understands them. She understands that private suffering is so much worse, because it’s immediate, because it’s hers, because, in that sense, it’s real. Far-off wars and abstract death counts, what do they mean to her, except maybe a marginal increase in petrol prices? And when she dies, she’ll pass as soundlessly as those forsaken cries in the desert.

Our suffering is our own, and that is the worst burden.

She picks up the yellow pages and methodically begins to dial. “Crossman, Aaron.”

[+]

She’s frustrated, but at least now she’s only frustrated. After the first ten calls, she has lost any sense of embarrassment. She’s always been somewhat afraid to call strangers. It’s irrational, she knows, and she doesn’t know what she’s afraid of, really. But all that is passed. Now she’s simply anxious.

She’s reached “Crossman, William Y.” and still no relation to Becks. With mounting apprehension, she scans the remaining centimeter of “Crossmans”. Maybe her parents divorced and she goes by a new last name. Maybe they’re unlisted. Yes, that must be it. There must be an additional three pages of unlisted Crossmans that she could not hope to contact.

But, of course, that doesn’t mean she won’t finish calling.

“Crossman, Wilhelmina”. What a strange name. Very Germanic. She pictures an aged matron answering “Allo, Vilhelmina speeking”. Behind her, hastily recovered, partially burned Nazi banners, framed, overhanging a glass case of fine china. Suddenly, she’s very afraid to call. It’s difficult to speak to someone who doesn’t like you by principal. People who dislike you personally are much less intractable.

But, skipping it would just mean she’d circle back around to it at the end. Hesitantly, she dials the number.

“Hello, Wilma speaking,” a genial voice answers in a deep, Birmingham accent. Her parents have always spoken in proper television accents, which earned her the derision of her peers for sounding “too posh”, but she’s always had a fondness for local accents. Those kinds of people sound much more approachable and interesting. Posh people sound all the same because they’re part of a tradition of self-contained units, not connected to anything but the past. But local people, their roots are in a place and they exist in a kind of harmony with it, like interdependent pieces to a puzzle. And it’s this openness that makes them so much easier to talk to. And, generally, more interesting.

“Er, hello, does someone named “Becks” reside there?”

“Becks? Oh, you’re calling for Robin? Sorry, she’s not in right now.”

“Oh.” Hermione’s crushed, and somehow she feels cut-off from enquiring further.

“But you can try her on her mobile if you’d like.”

“Yes, that would be wonderful!” She says, a little too enthusiastically.

She scrambled for a writing utensil, but her desk is empty of them, except for one ancient, chewed-up husk of a pen. She tests it on the yellow pages, but, unsurprisingly, it won’t write. Using quills for seven years makes one neglect one’s ball-point pen stock.

Finally, she finds a miniature tube of unused lipstick that a distant relation had given her for Christmas some years ago.

“Go ahead.”

She takes down the number, politely thanks Wilma and hangs up. In her excitement, she nearly slams the book closed. But she stops herself, realizing she would smear the number beyond recognition. She doesn’t know if she could have mustered the courage to call again.

She has it. Becks’s number. Her heart beats against her chest like a madman bodily throwing himself against his bars. She’s afraid to call. She’s liable to vomit. But she must speak to her. Must know.

She dials, it rings. Rings. Rings. RINGS.

“Hello—“

“Becks, it’s…”

But Becks is talking over her, and to Hermione’s vexation, she realizes that it is only Becks’s voicemail message.

She calls again, maybe Becks had been otherwise occupied, unable to reach her mobile in time. Maybe she’s waiting patiently for Hermione to call back.

“Hello, this is Becks. Leave me a message and, erm, don’t just hang up.”

“Becks, this is Hermione. Can you call me back as soon as it’s convenient for you? Thanks…Goodbye.” The pause was the most important part. It contained everything she was too afraid to say and everything she couldn’t yet put into words.

She calls twice more. Of course, no response.

Maybe Becks is busy doing, well, whatever it is that Becks does. But that justification rings hollow. Just a rationalization for Hermione to cling to, even when she knows, intellectually, emotionally, intuitively—that Becks is ignoring her.

And she can’t call again without giving away her desperation. And desperation is anathema to human connection, especially in so delicate a situation.

She feels paralyzed, and for the first time in her life, powerless.

[+]

When her parents’ room has been dark for over an hour, Hermione creeps down the stairs. The silverware door squeaks on the runners, but if she’s quick, she can make a physical replica of her wand and replace it in the drawer before her parents can make it down the stairs.

The drawer’s empty. She pulls out the silverware tray, slowly empties it onto the counter, gropes around in the darkness of the drawer, but there’s nothing but years of accumulated dust and black, sticky drawer scum.

Hermione closes her eyes, struggling to feel the magic in her blood. Something tingling or burning or throbbing to remind her that she’s still someone special. But that’s always been her problem, hasn’t it? Being so intellectually over-controlled that she can’t feel the natural reverberations of magic within her. It’s always made her feel inadequate. Like someone who’s only entitled to a position within the school because she can memorize the intellectual framework.

Maybe that’s what wrong. Maybe that’s what she’s been missing all along. The irrationality of magic…

Of love.