Decorum | ONC 2023 Shortlister

Chapter Five

The weather remained dreadfully dreary for the next few days, and Abigail passed the time sitting quietly in the library beside Victor, the two of them turned inwards into their own respective books. As promised, he had taken several healthy stacks of literature with him to a bedroom that was just several doors down from Abigail's. New roses were placed in the library, and one of these bouquets, Victor brought with him to his new room. For reasons that he didn't wish to explain, Victor had refused to return to his original bedroom. After much pressing on Abigail's part, he at last divulged the singular word "ghosts" before falling utterly unmovable on the subject.

So at night he would retire to his room, sometimes accompanied during the walk by Abigail and sometimes making his way there by himself, and in the late morning, he would again appear in the library, already bent over a book or over his newest passion: filling empty sheets of paper with delicate slanting cursive. He still ate little of his food, and on a nearly daily occurrence he would dump his cup of tea into the damp caverns of the decorative floor vase. He did not, however, ask that Abigail leave him anymore, and instead would let her sit at all hours in the library with him. She never managed to get halfway through any one book, instead growing bored of whatever book of poetry or philosophy that she had originally set herself upon.

The only thing that managed to capture Abigail's attention was the set of three field guides that she eventually discovered crushed against the far end of the bookshelf. Each book poured over colorful drawings of plants and birds and insects, and Abigail would often stare intently at each picture, reading about where they could be found and trying to remember the differences between mourning doves, white winged doves, and the Eurasian collared-dove. Sometimes she would take breaks from these images and would lay back on Victor's chaise lounge, lazily watching the forest or the depressive clouds that hung on the other side of the window. If a bird call was ever heard through the hourly drizzle of rain, Abigail would search for it in the blur of the forest's edge. Occasionally she would catch Victor joining her gaze out the window, and for a few moments the two would stare at the scenery together, isolated in their own thoughts and imaginings.

One day while Abigail was looking concentratedly between the images of chrysanthemums and dahlias, Victor addressed her from across the table.

"You seem to spend a lot of time in those." He said.

Abigail frowned at the blooming chrysanthemums, "They're all you have that are actually interesting."

Unbeknownst to her, Victor smiled softly in spite of himself. The Blackwell's vast collection of books had taken generations to accrue, and it held within it the respective tastes of the men and women who had come before. Who each book had originally belonged to had once been recorded somewhere in some vast ledger, and the ledger had undoubtedly been buried someplace between neglected books somewhere at some time. Unless the owner had scrawled their name onto the first page, however, Victor never knew the original collector's name. The names were never impressive to him. It was the handwritten messages of Happy Christmas or dear old friend that left a greater impression upon him— long lost relics of humanity that had existed within the Blackwell family once. Then again, perhaps these messages too were nothing more than mirrors for the displays of human emotion that were expected on holidays or between dear old friends. It amused him that all of this, the legacy of his family and their trifling well wishes to one another, was nothing more than a bore to his companion.

Abigail flipped a few more times between the chrysanthemums and dahlias before abandoning the field guide, trading it for the one on birds. She found it more interesting than flowers and insects, but perhaps this was just because birds seemed easier to figure out. For all her interest in puzzles and mysteries, she never much liked to bother with things that were only distinguishable by the most minor of details. A tiny bow fly was, for all intents and purposes, the same as a house fly to her. Although the differences between the two may become apparent under a microscope, they were the same creation from afar.