His Masterpiece

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

My family was never so rich as the Blacks and Potters, but we lived a comfortable life, our modest fortune built on trade. There were certain expectations of me. I was supposed to join my father and brothers in the family business, but when I told my parents I wanted to be an artist my father became so enraged that he said, "If you want to live the life of an artist, then you can starve like one," and promptly kicked me out of the family home.

With nowhere else to go, I found myself renting a garret room in Knockturn Alley. Knockturn Alley consists of several little cobblestone streets filled to bursting with narrow, crooked buildings held together with magic and a prayer. Their facades have turned black from centuries of chimney smoke and they are crowded so close together that only a sliver of the grey sky could be seen. From my garret window I can see a small, overgrown cemetery where last century's whores and pickpockets were tossed in all together. An old hagwitch is moving between the tombstones, harvesting the wild yarrow that grows there. There is a tavern in the building directly across from me where music can be heard at all hours of the night, and on both sides of the street hawkers cry out their wares. Two ragged-looking children are playing in the street while an old woman - a woman with a bit of goblin blood in her if I'm not mistaken - keeps an eye on the pair while she darns a sock from her spot on the stoop.

Despite the fact that I have been reduced to buttered bread and potatoes, I like this neighborhood. It is so full of life, and in the distance, through the cloudy haze of smoke, I can see the dome that sits atop of Gringott's and, a little further, the Ministry. One of these days, when I have enough money, I'm going to paint this street and all the people in it.

Every year the Académie des Arts Magiques hosts an exhibition and I am determined to earn a spot. My submission from last year had been rejected. I had put so much effort into it, nearly flunking all my NEWTs in order to complete it in time, and I had felt crushed when the Académie turned me down. But not this year. I am going to succeed. I already have the subject in my mind - a nude, male, a simple background - the only thing I lack is a model.

So I put an advertisement in the paper, feeling extremely silly about the whole thing. Right there, next to a grinning witch with wind-blown hair and holding a bottle of Sleekeazy's, are the words: WANTED! ARTIST'S MODEL. MALE. PREFERABLY TALL AND DARK HAIRED. MUST BE COMFORTABLE POSING UNDRESSED. WILL PAY. It embarrasses me to read it, and I was the one who wrote the damned thing. It makes me sound like a pornographer. There is a pornographer who lives two flights down from me, a husband-and-wife team who take moving photographs of naked women in funny poses. I went down to call on them once and found the man's wife riding atop a housecat that had been transfigured into a tiger, her bare breasts bouncing with each leap. "You know, like in that story, The Lady or the Tiger," the husband said to me with a grin. "Pretty clever, eh?"

"I don't think I've ever read that story," I told him faintly.

It has been almost a week since I put in the advertisement and I have yet to receive any callers. I had positioned the sofa where I wanted it, hung up drapes, my canvas was primed. I have everything but my model. I suppose I could try my luck on the street; there are a few male prostitutes that come out at night, or else look in at the brothel on the corner, but the thought of actually asking someone to take off their clothes so I could paint them to their face makes me want to curl up and die.

I had almost given up on the whole endeavor and resigned myself to painting another landscape when a knock comes at my door. When I open it I can feel my heart stop.

Severus Snape stares defiantly down at me.

"Oh, it's you," he says, apropos of nothing. "You were in Ravenclaw, right?"