As I was Going to St. Ives, with Hermione Granger, Down the Rabbit Hole

 

I have entered the magical realm of Harry Potter and am adventuring with Hermione, (Jealous?). We are wandering through an impossibly large garden filled with old crumbling archways on our way to visit the campus graveyard at Hogwarts, a shrine to students who have died on the premises. We seem to walk for hours before finally reaching a giant plaza of dark slate filled with silent pale statues. (I’ll be honest, this area was much more Lion, Witch and Wardrobe than HP, but really I wasn’t upset to be mixing the two.)

We walked silently to the center of the giant courtyard and were greeted by a very grave Dumbledore. He told us to be very careful, that nothing was as it seemed, and that in order to find the truth of the matter we needed to seek a pensive. Then with a wide grin, he disappeared from toe to smile like a Cheshire cat.

The pensive we are searching for is standing in the middle of the plaza, but we cannot see it because it exists in a parallel dimension to our own, there is only one way to reach it. Hermione places a candle atop my head, and one upon her own, and we begin to feel mildly warm. I realize that we are melting with the wax, slowly and without pain. We puddle out like Dali’s clocks onto the floor, time shifts, and we are slowly sucked back up into our original forms, there sits the pensive.

We walk over slowly, and dip our heads into the pool. A pensive does not feel how you would think, it is filmy, cold and unpleasant, and I don’t know how Harry did it because I have to hold my breath the whole time. We peer deep into it and see a girl walking into the courtyard we were just standing in. She holds a bundle, a lumpy brown canvas bag full of cats. There is a massive fireplace on one end of the courtyard blocked off by a black grate. I cannot imagine why she should have cats in sacks as we were nowhere near St. Ives

She walks towards the fire, removes a small orange cat from the bag and casts it in. She blocks our view, and stands there just watching the poor animal suffer. She pulls three more cats from the bag and does the same then reaches deep into the bottom of the bag and pulls out the very last. It is a young boy of about twelve and he is paralyzed.

She tosses him into the fire and laughs wildly. The fire then flames out immediately leaving a pile of glittering pink ash which the girl rolls in like a beast. She now has the power to rearrange the shape of people’s faces at her whim, or upon request. We pull up out of the pensive and stare across at one another too stunned to speak, Hermione regains her composure first, “Well, there are certainly better ways to go about changing one’s face. Why did she not simply become a plastic surgeon?” On this point, we were in total agreement.