Hogwarts School - Summer

Bottles

It was an ordinary day—un jour plus ordinaire—the day you died. At least, it was for most people. They’d walk through French stonework on the way to class, worried about some exam or the way that girl with a skirt an inch too short looked at them—or didn’t. Watching them now, it’s all fun, fun, fun. Anything to get away from their dreary, boring two bezant lives. But not you.

You were perfect: your swagger made me believe you just didn’t care, your subtle arrows of words pierced those centuried walls, and your smile let us walk slyly by. You’re here—not there, not under their clutches—maman, papa, grand-mère, la dernier soeur.

Besides the glass, you curl up and stare up at me, wondering if I’ll notice, if I’ll remember, if I’ll cry. No, never. And yet, your blue eyes do not meet my silhouette. What’s stopping you? Why don’t you get up and start a conversation—ask me about my day? Je vous mets au défi. What’s to stop you from sliding an extra bezant into that sullied man’s hand as he pays for his triple-strength wit-sharpening potion, or from lifting that extra glass of giggle water from the bar and topping it up with a splash of lime? The bartender is about twenty-seven, your age, and seems, like you, to be alone. Slide her a smile—the cunning one.

You’ll knock over my things—that’s how you’ll get my attention. First the small bottles—the empty ones. You always thought there were too many—brown ones, green ones—and it didn’t matter that they were cheap. Wash your hands, get yourself dirty.

Mistake, mistake, mistake—arrête ma chouchoutte—you whisper in my ear as you watch the ingredients flit down into the cauldron: chubara scales and thyme. The wind whistles your song—a French lullaby—to pass the time. Fais dodo, colas mon p’tit frère. Her voice, high-pitched but unstrained, informs your rendition, turning my cauldron into a childhood plaything.

The way you look back at me through the glass—it’s not real to you, is it? You’re filled with chrysanthemums, and basilisk oil, and pine nettles—all commonplace to you because it's so much easier to sit on a shelf than be out in the world. Out, out, out amongst the chaos of the field, chasing Kelpies rather than answers.

Oh, that’s not what it was? Tell me. Dis-le moi maintenant.

Now, that’s not fair: the way your smile curls around the side of the bottle just like that. She’s my customer—just look at how skillfully she flicks the bones in her wrist as she pours a glass of giggle water—and you've had your chance.

You won’t go. You’ll keep her waiting in your polished leather shoes, the ones Oncle Alexandre bought for you in Confluences. How proud you had been then, freshly nineteen and a true Lyonnais. Go on, tell me how ashamed you are to find me Parisian. Smell me. Pick up the washed tones of La Seine in my hair, and trace her veins from the outskirts to find me.

That’s how you did it, personne ne t'a dit? How do you reflect yourself into every glass? You see my face and you pull on the fat in my cheeks until the lines resemble yours—except they always did. When you lay on the shore, cold, your skin was my skin. I had not your skill then, but I have your skin. Your skin curls around this bottle I crafted. Should I crush it? Would you want that?

Non, ici quand tout vous abandonne, on se fabrique une famille invisible.

You haunt me still. You haunt me in the nettles. In the instructions on the parchment. In conversations with customers and vendors alike. In the leather that dons my back.  In dark alleyways, familiar and foriegn. And in the giggle water that seals a coy deal.

Toi, mon frère, I feel your soul in the glass—in every single bottle.

She didn’t know it, out by the lilacs and hyacinth, but this would be the last time she entered the Lisse manor. Cuffing the collar of her jet black trench coat, the seventeen-year-old wasn’t afraid of what was to come, and that was why she chose to come as herself—not the weak Beauxbatons student she had been. Because the truth was she had ceased being a student the minute she ripped open the door to school’s potions stalls. Stopped being a child and, in their eyes, she had ceased to be a Lisse.

The road up to the house was long and wide, far from the city lights of muggle Lyon. Exhaling, Chloé watched the air float up and out from her lips like whips of smoke from an overheated iron kettle. Her kitten heel boots sunk into the gravel with each step, weighted by the gravitas of her alleged indiscretion.

Of course, it wasn’t alleged. It was real: she had stolen illicit ingredients and she had been expelled, despite being the very best in her class. She had had a reason, of course—there was always a rationale—but she refused to give her Lucien up. Such was the price of family—its dull roots could only hold so much.

As she approached the iron gates so familiar, her grey eyes hung on the large granite gargoyle atop the roof. There were several, as there had always been throughout her time in the house, but this one seemed to be watching her. To a muggle, it was rather reminiscent of the gargoyles on Notre Dame: thin, but imposing with large wings, a slithering tail and small, round horns. Its eyes were tall and bright, almost as if the stone allowed for a twinkle in its eye. Carved in a fine dark sandstone, the gargoyles seemed to know something she did not: for what branches grew out of this stony rubbish?

Raising her brow, she offered the figure a slight nod of acknowledgement as she crossed the threshold of the manor’s yard. Throughout her childhood no being, including the gargoyles, had exactly been treated well by the Lisse family. But now, she was one of them, having chosen to defend a distant and excommunicated relative over the family nucleus. It was, as far as her parents were concerned, a disloyalty. And the price she would pay would be as high as the crime committed.

Growing up, the gargoyles had been the most intimidating thing about the house—or at least they were supposed to be. But now Chloé with her angled eyes and knowing mouth painted in bright red lipstick—not to mention her deep magic—was the intimidating one. Perhaps she had learned something from a childhood amongst the gargoyles: do not be afraid of the monsters, but rather make them afraid of you.

Out of the edge of her wand, she flicked an illusion of white to fill-in the patches where the sun had begun to scorch the snow. April had never been kind to this great, old house—from the bright stone roof to the wide windows, hidden by heavy overpriced Parisian brocade. Here in the garden her mother’s topiaries stood like sentinels, second only to the gargoyles above, as though the entire manor had been arranged for its own protection. For years, she had enjoyed that protection, if not by choice.

Now the interior would hold anything but safety. They weren’t happy, she knew, but that wasn’t unusual—they had never been happy. Perhaps there had been a brief fleeting moment when she was born, but the dark clouds of postpartum settled in the rolling French countryside. That early, she’d already been a disappointment despite every attempt to educate and mold her. 

The wood grain was darker and thicker than she last recalled it, and she would have sworn the fine lines made a face just above the door knocker, mocking her. Chloe would not knock. Stepping back, she whipped her hair back into the wind as she straightened out her posture and carved the gravel into the shape of a sickle at her feet. Then, blinking she pressed the handle forward.

The click of the door emulated in a fifty foot sphere around the foyer. There was no need to vocalize on top of this; she already knew they were waiting from Maman to Tante Honoré and Grand-mère Celeste. Those who’d had the privilege of stepping back into the safe arms of marriage or other ambitions had been called back to discipline the now unexpectedly oldest heir to the line.

Thus, they sat around a wide circular table—the same blackwood that had stood in the dining room as long as she could remember. At the head were Maman and Papa, their expressions teetering between a calmed preparedness and a readied anger. Reneé’s light brown hair curled around her ear as if charmed severely into place while Mathis wore his spectacles just far enough down his nose it might as well have been a second pair of eyes. At her father’s left sat Juliette, her younger sister now favored.  Falling down from them on either side, they seemed to sit two-by-two as if down a family tree; each pair as unsympathetic as the last. Only Oncle Alexandre seemed to tilt his head in genuine acknowledgement as her dark heel stepped into the wood floor, setting off a gentle crack into the oversized room.

Not a word shuttered through the stilted air as the girl pulled back a chair, gently padded with studded leather, and took a seat at the far end of the table, opposite the pair that had set her into the world. Sitting up, she knotted her fingers up on top of the wood in a gentle prayer. Her grey eyes flit down to the wood grain and across to look over at her mother, then her father. And while she knew she had shrunk in their view, she had never seen them quite so small as if the harsh winter light had revealed their true size—or what she wished.

Sliding her foot gently forward, she would wait for them: “We need to know what happened.” The seconds rolled across the table as if only by force. Her tongue searched the roof for her mouth for something eloquent, something her mother would have said. But it didn’t come.

What came from her lips, glossed in a fine scarlett veneer, was the truth: “You have the report from the school. Look at the facts.” And indeed they had. They’d had owls and owls from Beauxbatons, both about the incident in question and the general way she had taken to incorrectly wearing the school uniform, blazer set ajar as she showed a peculiar interest in pseudodragons. Somehow the fact that she was—and had been for several years—one of the top performing students seemed less important now.

“The facts are not in your favor,” boomed a voice across the table.

Her feet shifted back underneath her chair. “Because the facts don’t matter to you,” she said very clearly like a drop of holy water bouncing in a church bowl, “What matters to you is the blame. So go on, blame me.” And so rippled out the dare into the open, ancient family abode. Perhaps there had been others here sometime ago—reckless teenagers and bold warriors on this given land—and maybe therein existed an unseen generational strength as she attempted to pack a little life into a dried family demeanor.

But the generation across the table did not see this, did not understand it. In so many ways, Monsieur and Madame did not—and seldom had—understood their middle daughter. From birth, she had been unexpectedly rough on the edges: tall, bright, and spirited.

And she dared them.

The courage bellowed into the old room like a desert lion’s roar, and no one tried to answer it. Renée’s gaze fell squarely on her husband, who’d always been so stoic in both fatherhood and business. The receiver, Mathis, just rocked back into his chair, his fine woolen suit falling against the back. Instead, it was an old woman, her hair magically stained in gold, who spoke: “Enough. Let us break for tea.” The family, commanded by generations, would be nothing if not civilized.

And as the elder woman stood up, so too did the others follow as the porcelain tea cups manifested themselves along the long corner table like a buffet to ease a Sunday. Feathered hats and bowlers descended like black crows overhead. Chloé walked over, speaking to no one, and took a cup, filling it to the brim, before she slung off to a corner in the adjoining room. Just beyond the wide windowed-doors she stood, eyeing the crisp white puddles as she grasped the tea cup around its middle, holding it just below her lip as she mourned the winter that had kept them warm. She should have expected this: a quiet but fervent family trial. But she didn’t waste time thinking about what to say or how to defend herself; she just stared out at the grass, which seemed even more distant than when she had tread on it earlier.

“You should apologize,” came the low voice of Oncle Alexandre, who had snuck up at her side, his black pinstripe suit shadow blocking out the rest of the room.

Chloé raised the cup to drink from it. “No,” she replied without a turn of her head.

In the crux of her left ear she could hear the frustration in his breathing as the seconds ticked past them. “Chloé, I know what Lucien…” he began but his voice trailed off when she remained blissfully unresponsive. A fuller-bodied man, Alexandre’s gentle tone struggled to find the best way to reach her, a child he’d never had, a semblable of strength. “If you want this to go away,” he tried to reposition himself, “you need to tell them.”

The minute stretched wide as the young woman squinted, counting the gliterings of snowflakes directly across the window pane. “No,” she reiterated, “I don’t have to tell them and you don’t get to tell me what to do.” Only then did she look him in the eye to provide both the drama and strength she knew the scene required. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen, and when it did, she at least wanted to maintain some sense of self-control—that was the only thing she had left.

“They’re coming back,” she told him, eyebrow raised like something terrible was about to happen.

And it was.

Turning on her heel, the seventeen year old strutted back into the main room as her plum caplet hung delicately behind her, a token of family elegance. Her brown eyelashes fluttered shut for a brief second of respite as she took her seat, condemned she knew before the proceedings moved a second forward with the girth of a Phonecian tribunal. And so, she didn’t speak—not much anyway—but let them lay out in front of her exactly what they thought had happened, exactly how they thought she had (mis)behaved. With each piece of parchment manifested a new reason explaining how she was an awful, awful girl. The ink ran heavy across the pages. But that was nothing compared to the ingredients—belladonna and laced vine amongst Graphorn horn and Etruscan fairy wings and more—that lay on the table, her mortal failure resting like a casket on the wood. Her lower lip quivered at the sight.

The catalogue of her faults droned on and on, all but stopping short of accusing her of being pigeon-toed. She was too clever, too rash, too selfish—violent mistakes for a woman, or as they still thought of her, a girl. While the voices were never angry, she knew what lay underneath the calm facade as they recounted the event: the plot, the theft, the loss. Most important was the loss: a boy, just made a man, and so full of not only expectation, but promise.

That, in hearing her brother’s holy name so callously called into question, was when she broke: “Bad things just happen.” Like grand-mère, she was tired—exhausted of having them settle the dust of death at her feet like it had been deliberate, like she had wanted to kill him, like she’d had any control of it at all. Her fingernails, glossed in black, protruded further into the wood grain as she pushed against it, hands overlapping.

“With you, constantly,” her mother snapped back.

But the girl didn’t care, not one bit and she kept on pressing, a sudden frost disturbed: “That’s the problem with you all: you think you can control fate. With your golden bezants, large manor and great history, you think you hold the world in your palm, but there are some things not even magic can control—“ Her voice grew not in volume, but in strength, seeming more resolute with each syllable that cut sharply across the table.

“Chloé—” cautioned her uncle, the first time he had spoken amongst the group. 

Her grey eyes shifted towards him—a mere second of acknowledgement across a bridge of expression—before her mouth barrelled forward, fuelled not only by her own anger, but that of the room: the anger pointed squarely at her own heart. “And no matter how powerful your casting or whatever artifact or potion you use, things just happen,” she bellowed, eyes wide, “You can be careful, you can be a Lisse and fate just—”

“You’re not a Lisse anymore,” her father interrupted, standing. The late winter light flashed from the window onto his heightened cheekbones, carving out a necessary determination. “You may have an hour to gather your things. And then you will leave this house and never return. If you try, you will not find the property. If you write, there will be no reply. It will be…” he paused to look upon her moon face, “as if you’d have never been born.”

A tight ball of saliva slithered down her throat and sank into the pit of her stomach. “A life for a life…” she muttered meekly under her breath as she eyed the purple flower, the lady of situations, across the table. For a family that operated so much on status, only in death could they find equality. Feeling her own breathing rise and fall, Chloé peered carefully from the woodgrain up to the faces that resembled her own from the quiver in the temple to the strength of a chin. Goosebumps rose on matching skin, undone.

“All right then,” she acquiesced, “but I don’t need your hour. I don’t need you at all.” Rising from her chair, she stood up straight and tall, sliding her right hand into the darkened pocket of her woolen caplet. Her nimble fingers latched around the fine grains of dark sand, one of the last things she and Hux had gotten their hands on before she was asked to leave the school. Pulling on the fine crushed rock, she launched it into the floor in a ball and apparated—not without a brief pause of doubt—as the black smoke rose from where the grains had fallen.

The adults pulled themselves back and looked at one another, puzzling out what the young girl had just done—not that it mattered. None of it mattered—not now.

But Chloé didn’t see those expressions or hear the questions—none of it as her shoe hit slid over a patch of sticky snow, covering her pale body in what remained of winter’s comforting embrace. Against an aged stone wall, she cried, arms at her side against the white, as a single gargoyle, its wings wide, looked on. Something inside her shifted as she held her position, mixing memory and desire, here in a world indifferent.

Hello! This is a hermit crab essay that heavily (and creatively) references a certain Sondheim musical rather than a more traditional faerie tale. I wanted to explore what an untraditional protagonist might look like in this context.

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Across the wooded floor came the flashes of white light as the girl, honey-haired, sat beside the cauldron, black but bright. It was too perfect in some ways—the thunder, the fall winds kicking up the dirt on the muggle street below as her blue eyes examined the quiet crossroads for the bearers—but she didn’t let a storybook setting, however urban and unsettled, distract from the task. For not everyone could go into the woods. It was a unfortunate prerequisite of this brew that her hands, pale and puny things, could not touch that which birthed the potion.

It was a fate left in the hands of others on this, the last midnight.

Her black heels scratched the floor as she curled her body up against the window, as if proximity could render her wishes real. Boney fingertips curled around her black cherry wand protectively, though she knew spell-work alone could not always mend situations complicated by the politics of the heart or other relations.


If her mother could, she suspected she would easily call this girl by the window the most morally loose member of the Lisse family. But she didn’t talk to her mother—not since then. Tossing her ponytail to one side, Chloe didn’t mind; in fact, she didn’t care.

Out on the street and beyond into the woods, those others would be lying, doing whatever they had to for their items, their piece in the potion—a grog that had very little to do with them. Laced in her charm work, she had seeded her needs, those odd facets of seeing progress, sensing danger—whatever a human might to do to meet goals—good goals, bad goals, her goals.

And then when they arrived, she knew, in the doom and the gloom, and she’d steal away dreams, they would want what really mattered: the blame. That was what always mattered from the window or the potions stall: someone you can blame. And so, she took it. Again, and again.

“Alright, mother, when?” Chloe said as she followed a raindrop down to the street below.


They all had been when she’d first encountered them—the stock boy, the unsuspecting student, the milkman’s daughter—and that’s what made them so perfect. An infuriating moral compass drove people into the street, into the woods because they thought they were good. As if like in the books that lined her childhood bedroom, there was good and bad and that faux magic—quiet and unsuspecting, the kind that saved your poor muggle life.

Clicking her tongue, Chloe knew better: she wasn’t good; she wasn’t bad; she was just right. And that was more valuable than any morality. It was the precision that would allow the waves to settle smack on time underneath these bubbles. The math of her life had accumulated to this very spot—the culmination of chaos in a bid for perfection.

This was what they did not understand: beauty was not perfection.


Black nail varnished reflected her face back at her, older now and jaded. Or was it? Sometimes Chloe wondered if she had been born older, more complex and already in distain for the world. Or if it had all been a product of circumstance—a birth from the blame. And in that shame, she grew, tall and lanky, into what no one at the little French school could believe: a dangerous woman.

And so, they left her. Gave her claws and a hunch. The lizard skin she took with pride, a new armor and scale as every difficulty, real or contrived, landed on her name. And yet still, her magic pulsed within her blue-blood veins, and the thunder rapped on the tin roof as she spied her—the girl with the red cloak—along the cobbles.

Reaching into the black leather of her jacket with a single gloved hand, Chloe pulled out a pale green bean and held it up to that lighting light as she watched the girl, drenched in scarlet, cross the street, unaware of the potion’s properties.

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