antebellum [t. riddle]

lxxix

april 1945

tom had always been intolerant of things he didn't like. he starved on nights when the nuns at the orphanage served food he didn't like. he sulked, he faked sick, he threw tantrums, but once he realized he got as much screaming as he did by staying silent, he learned to save his energy. in the orphanage, they barely had enough to share, let alone to hoard. it was only when he knew magic and power that he began to understand that noncooperation was not effective protest if he was not providing value in the first place. his hunger strikes meant more food for the other children. his screams fell on ears trained to mute them. 

unlike most young witches and wizards raised by muggles, tom discovered his magic relatively early in his life. those halfblood or pureblood children raised by wizard parents knew from birth that they would be magical. they overexerted themselves often, attempting to force adolescent magic out of their bodies before it was ready. they wanted nothing more than to join their parents in the conveniences that magic allowed them, even before it was legal for them to do so.

it manifested in tom very young, when he was only a child— at seven years old, mrs. cole had locked tom in his bedroom as punishment for refusing to attend bible study. the whole of it bored him; he'd gone his entire life and learned all there was to know about god. he spewed every last excuse his young ears had heard the older kids use, but mrs. cole had had quite enough of his constant lying. tom could be bleeding from his eyes, and she still would struggle to believe he was truly in pain. while the rest of the orphanage was gone, young tom sat silently in his room, positively fuming with frustration and helplessness, when a stray sensation seemed to bring him to his feet.

it was like the earth was whispering to him— not the boards beneath his feet, nor the air around him— but the space everywhere that was not occupied by his body. he could almost hear it, like a shrill, near silent whistle in his mind.

the feeling frightened tom, but it also enticed him, as the obscure and cryptic always had.

he wanted to be free of the room so badly, the conviction felt so deeply, that when tom reached out and let his fingernails scrape the wall, he found it malleable. great chunks of the brick wall crumbled like wet sand as he grasped at them, and it fell away with ease. he pressed his fingers then with more force into the wall, pushing and pushing the liquid stone further and further out of the way until he could feel the outside raindrops landing on his fingers.

he snatched his hand away from the wall, quickly realizing the brick could re-solidify at any minute and encase his entire hand inside it.

it was like his hand had been struck by lighting— not because of the pain, but because of the serendipity. the adrenaline burned so badly that it felt like new blood in his veins, blood that was not his own. he could not sit. tom was not understanding how it could be that the walls that had previously trapped him had suddenly stopped being a barrier. for a moment, he feared that the building was about to collapse on him, perhaps god punishing him for his earlier blasphemous thoughts.

after minutes of waiting, nothing happened.

tom felt a slight tingling sensation that seemed to run through his arms and settle in his fingertips, which prompted him to begin touching a host of things in his room. his bed, hard as corkboard, suddenly felt like it was filled with feathers. his hand print left in the mattress like an angel in the snow. the windows, locked from the outside, suddenly tore like thin plastic and the hinges crumbled like pencil lead. the spiders that bit at him in his sleep suddenly abandoned their webs and scattered from the room.

from that moment on, tom had not known a problem he could not solve with magic, and every answer he desired was only a bit of research or experimentation away. he never let the limitations of the physical world again be a barrier to what he hoped to achieve— he had now ascended to a new level of humanity, one that he felt set him on a higher plane of being than the swill that constantly surrounding him. tom could no longer be bothered by their problems, and he ceased to pay them any mind when they weren't the subjects of his experiments. he stopped intentionally picking fights with the other children, stopped being an unnecessary nuisance to mrs. cole. tom had new things to focus his attention on.