Friday Free Fall writing prompt- moon child
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Sometimes I think of people from fiction and the silver screen. Like Luna, from Harry Potter. I don’t know why I thought of her today. When first I saw her onstage, it was with a magical horseless carriage. Everybody else thought the carriage ran by magic; only Luna and Harry could see the fantastic horse. Not Harry’s friends. So Luna said gently to Harry, “You’re not mad, I see the horse too.”
She told Harry in her usual soft, soft voice, “They can only be seen by someone who has seen death.” She knew who Harry had seen, she didn’t have to ask. She volunteered, “I saw my mother die. I was nine.”
Call me cold and callous, but I can’t remember how her mother died. Her father raised her. He too had white hair, but his skin was not so pale. Maybe Luna got her complexion from her mother. Later her dad had a horrible visit from the death eater gang, and later Luna was in a prison such as no girl should be in—She would have been about sixteen then, but luckily all they showed of the prison was the stone walls, but still, those death eaters like cruelty for it’s own sake. Like certain followers of Trump.
…When the prisoners at last went separate ways she said goodby to Mr Ollivander, a very old Wand maker.
“I’m going to miss you, Mr Ollivander.”
“And I you, my dear. You were an inexpressible comfort to me in that terrible place.”…
Luna and Harry’s nemesis, “he who must not be named” was like Trump in that he didn’t just relish his goodly amount of money, and very good amount of power, but instead sought still more power than he already had. Partly because, like Trump with an ideology of America being for ‘real Americans,’ the unnamed one hated any blood mingling with mundanes—muggles, they were called.
Later, Harry learns how the half-blood prince had formidable magic. Still later, he met the half-blood prince, and the man declared he was ashamed of his muggles half.
As for soft-voiced Luna, I’m sure, given her magic-clothed father, looking like he just stepped out of Bohemia, that while away from Hogwarts she must have associated purely with her own kind. In adulthood she would have only had a few special friends; at boarding school she would be on the sidelines, never part of any giggling flock of girls. Maybe losing her mother made everyday life at school seem trivial.
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Update, personal note: Part of the joy of writing is having your muse be helpful. In my fiction writing I innocently put stuff on the page that to my surprise really pays off in a subsequent chapter. Maybe the muse is especially present if you are writing as fast as you can, at Friday Free Fall.
At any rate, after writing I realized, to my surprise, I was like Luna. I too was a survivor of stuff, and for years normal mundane conversations seemed trivial (like dust and ashes, when you want to silently scream) when I forever had a burning need to understand, to have perspective on what happened, a need that I would naturally have suppressed. At the time, I would have merely speculated I was an introvert, or socially unskilled. Both ideas would have been somewhat true, of course, but not the whole story.
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Grey quotations for late at night:
I found the old wand maker’s line to be poetic. When I am feeling blue, as in thinking of Luna, then poetic quotes are a comfort. Here’s a passage about a professor like Dumbledore who has time traveled—from The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis—using the Oxford faculty time device, and on a cold cloudy day he is feeling sick to his soul, hearing distant unknowing church bells:
…and he thought they must be able to hear them all the way to Oxford, 700 years away.
It came to Dunworthy suddenly that Jane was not dead, that here in this terrible year, in this century that was worse than a ten, that she had not yet died, and it seemed to him a blessing beyond any he had any right to expect.
Ms Willis wrote a story where the physics of time travel, like a rubber band that snaps only once, means that if you miss your drop zone pickup then you are stranded forever… …An utterly alone, stricken young lady makes her final recording, to be found in the future:
It’s strange. When I couldn’t find the drop and the plague came, you seemed so far away I would not ever be able to find you again. But I know now that you were here all along, and that nothing, not the Black Death nor seven hundred years, nor death nor things to come nor any other creature could ever separate me from your caring and concern. It was with me every minute.
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Sean Crawford
Calgary,
August,
2025
