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Argus Filch was a yardsale connoisseur.
It was a natural identity for a solitary Squib to assume. He would never be caught dead in an actual Muggle store; the Muggles always gave him the strangest looks for his questions-the assumptions he was supposed to make!-and there was always the nagging paranoia he'd be seen by the parents of some telltale Muggleborn. His trips to magical shops were always purely for show, and he could use nothing he bought. So the only way he could procure anything useful was to stroll up and down the village streets on sunny afternoons and see what the Muggles had cast out on their lawns.
None of them questioned the shadiness of the old, stringy, unkempt man in his long coat as he perused through dusty boxes. Behind him might be a man with equally long hair and scruffy face wearing a faded tropical shirt or a ripped raincoat. Certainly, the woman twice his size wearing bright pink leggings and inspecting a half-melted pair of Wellingtons she planned to purchase, or the little boy missing his two front teeth and playing with a Hotwheels missing its two front wheels couldn't talk.
It was at these casual, anonymous neighborhood flea markets Argus came to acquire everything he needed: a washboard and tub to replace Scourgify, a WWII-era First Aid kit full of dissolving gauze in exchange for Ferula!. Yet he had never quite found anything suitable for cleaning carpet-and Argus craved clean carpet. Brooms and rug-beaters could only do so much, and to soak it in suds took ages and encouraged mold.
One day, he found it.
It was a strange shape, nothing like a broom, though it stood upright and possessed a handle. It had lovely curves, a neat canvas diaphragm and a bulging foot near the ground, lovely even in its decaying shades of taupe and grey.
"You want to try out the vaccuum, sir?" came the voice of the always-nosy keeper of the yard sale. "I swear it isn't junk; we're just moving and can't take it with us."
"Show me how it works," Argus replied, "this vaccuum." Even the name was deliciously exotic sweetness.
"Alrighty." The man seized the handle and dragged the device over to the side of the house, where there was a small, rectangular plate with holes in it, shaped not unlike an expressionless face. "This baby's so strong, it could suck up the grass. That's why my wife's kept it all these years." He pulled on what appeared to be the tail of the vacuum, a thick black cord not unlike a whip, adorned on the end with a few spikes, which he forced into the eyes and mouth of one of the faces on the plate. Then, as if tapping it with a wand, he prodded a button on the shapely foot. Immediately, the being came to life, the grit on the pavement lurching towards it, blades of grass bending to its will. It roared like a lion-and then came to rest as the man pressed the button again.
He bought it and took it home, and, sure enough, there was one of those minimalist little faces in the corner of his once-Muggle house. He slipped the metal prongs in, poked the button . . .
The machine roared and lurched forward, Argus pulled along with it. There was a moment of panic until he looked down and saw the bright swath of carpet in its path, sucked clean after years of dirty hesitation to clean.
Argus wept. He was in love.