Hello for the first time, Avenlee! I haven’t interacted with you at all, but I’m a fan of your art – especially the wonderful kaleidoscopic two-tone portraits in The Wanderers’ Gallery.
I will admit that my being assigned to write a romantic piece was due to something I neglected to clarify in my forum post, but it was a welcome challenge – I’ve been meaning to branch out and sharpen my skills on different genres, even ones as foreign to me as romance. Unfortunately, I’ve had an unproductive year. The only romance novel in my possession – the classic Ice Planet Barbarians by the legendary Ruby Dixon, gifted to me exactly one year ago – has sat unread on the shelf on my desk for all that time, and I only had the time and willpower to get through three short stories for the sake of preliminary research: “White Nights” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx, and “The Woman with the Dog” by Anton Chekhov. Despite that I'm still not all that good at romanse [\\sic.\\] [[//sic/ [[//sic.//.
I do recommend these stories, especially “Brokeback Mountain” (to me, the purest example of a love story on this list) – but none of them really applied to the prompt I was given. Proulx’s story is suffused with the tragedy of identities discovered too late and the pain and dissonance of closeted lives, “White Nights” features an irritatingly puerile but uncomfortably relatable protagonist, and Chekhov’s story, despite the tender note it ends on, is far too bitter starting out (and features a very uncomfortable gap in age and maturity) –- not to mention that the plots of all three revolve around infidelity. Despite the many useful bits of knowledge I gathered from my choices of inspiration I knew once I had read them that I had chosen some strange substrates from which to grow this narrative — and it ended up reading like fanfiction anyway, what with it being a mostly-unplanned stream of ideas — "yes, and" with myself, feat. sleep deprivation. This is why it ended up being so rushed. Though in-universe the climactic moment has been getting built up for years and years, I should (and will) tighten it up to make the text reflect this.
Also, apologies. In attempting to commandeer this story into an ode to a great museum in my city, I completely changed the backstory for Amelia Heart you provided in your notes. I hope this alternative interpretation of her background and character are to your satisfaction.
I decided to use your page “Blossoms of Love” as both inspiration and a diegetic connecting thread – I wanted to pay tribute to your work somehow, and the narrative arc outlined in the haiku seemed like it’d lend itself well to a good love story. And though I'd like to think this works as its own standalone story (despite the many threads left unwound and the unifying mystery at its center), I'd like to discuss with you an idea I had on expanding it once you know who I am.
~Your Gifter
In cherry blossoms,
Love's whispers in the spring breeze,
Two hearts intertwine.
There were, apart from the Library, three houses of knowledge Avenlee trusted enough to honor with regular visits. He was enraptured with the grand Bibliotheca Alexandrina, of course (for a visit to its storied predecessor through an inversely-temporal Way would be far too expensive, and the thought of awkwardly donning a himation and attempting to mask hundreds of subconscious, unmistakably modern mannerisms and ways of speech as a stranger two thousand years misplaced was terrifying to the recluse); the little public library which as an orphan child he had found his first refuge in, if he ever felt particularly overburdened by his labor and sought to be pulled back down to Earth; and, on certain slow days, Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum and Library.
He didn’t know what had initially drawn him to the little rowhouse on Delancey Street. It was a gem, to be sure, sufficiently hidden from the city’s center and denatured of the capitalistic hoarding impulse from which it had been born – but after two years of biweekly visits, Avenlee had found that the books and papers amassed by the Rosenbach brothers over their many years in the business of collecting were merely an appetizer to his Library-fattened mind. Reading everything in the collection was to him equivalent to perusing a short story. But even after he had gathered from the incunabula and letters and yellowed treatises and rare modernist novels (and even taken the time to, with the blessing of the museum’s staff, analyze in every possible way all the paintings and statuary on display) all that he could ever need to write dozens upon dozens of essays and treatises of his own, he couldn’t help but go back every two weeks, following his unchanging schedule. He knew exactly why, of course, but he did his best to push the uncouth feeling deep into the recesses of his mind whenever it crossed it.
The librarian, Amelia, would always greet him warmly in the precious occasion that they were both in the reading room at the same time — they had probably spoken of the nuances and provenances of every collection within the collection, puzzled out the nearly hieroglyphic handwriting of famous figures from Benjamin Rush to Georgia O'Keefe, and had taught each other very much through their dialogues — he with his myriad essays and unfinished drafts for nonfiction books started simply for an excuse to return to Philadelphia, she with her memorized, encyclopaedic knowledge of every nook and cranny of the museum. Alexander and Amelia had for two years so courted each other, Alexander rationalizing and denying the excited warmth he felt whenever they spoke and Amelia (to the opposite party) seeming only to be friendly, to the extent that the venerable doctor was teased and met with droll, knowing glances by nearly all of Amelia's co-workers whenever they met with him.
It's like I'm a schoolboy, he would often think in humiliated disgust, who do they take me for?
But the visits never stopped, even when he ran entirely out of ideas for new ways to milk the Rosenbach's collection; and Alexander's efforts to deny his subconcious feelings grew more and more strained. It was not as this had never happened before. Alexander had lost count of how many times he had grown infatuated with someone only to, after months or years of conversation and communion and mounting closeness, disappear completely through a Way and wait out the detumescence of his limerence in the alcove he had carved for himself beyond the solid ground of Earth. His would-be flings amounted to poems, pieces of art at the best of times, but never to anything as fleeting as romance. He had the few friends in the Library to keep him from starvation for companionship, and he had through countless imagined philosophical dialogues with himself been convinced that that would always be enough.
He was by every indication about to continue this cycle when, on a brief sojourn into the Library's biography section, he happened by complete chance to glimpse Amelia from afar.
At first, he attempted to hide — they were in the same row, but the docent attending to her bought him some time with which he hastily pulled the nearest volume (the autobiography of Ŭsmar II of Phirec, a classic if infuriating portrait of a deeply disturbed man) off the shelf and over his face — running would attract unwanted attention, and here in the Library the gossips had eyes and ears quite literally everywhere. Eventually, though, as he pretended to read the great king's boastful accounts of mass decapitations and baths in blood, Alexander felt a tap on his shoulder.
"Alexander! I thought I'd find you here. I- we- have something to show you back at the Rosenbach." The words were music to his ears — like that of Penderecki. He could not help but blush, of course, and he naturally managed a rickety smile.
"You thought you'd find me here?"
"I mean, of course someone like you —" her eyes rested on his for a moment, and he assured himself he was ascribing greater meaning to the look than it actually conveyed — "would love it in the Library."
"How long have — how long have you known about this place?"
"Did you think I only read old books at work? I've been coming here since I was a freshman in college! The Wanderers' Library is the reason I decided to work where I did."
"And we've only met here now."
"I guess we aren't meant to cross paths very often." Alexander hoped the faint melancholia he heard tinging those words was no illusion. "Still, though, the Library will do what it does. Like I said, I have something to show you."
"Something new, I take it."
"Exactly: a new acquisition! Couldn't have come at a better time. It's great of you to humor us, but I know you're getting tired of writing the same five papers about the same fifteen artifacts."
Alexander replied with a nod and the bravest face he could muster. He couldn't speak — he knew that the maelstrom of emotion overtaking his psyche was too profound to ignore, and that if he attempted to speak he would crack, and cry, and once again run away never to see Amelia again even if it took a thousand years in the remotest corner of the Library. For once in his life, then, Alexander Avenlee made the resolution to face the palaver of romance and nascent love and take whatever assailed him as a result on the chin.
The Way Amelia opened led directly into the Rosenbach's reading room. It was night in Philadelphia, and as Amelia turned on the light Alexander realized with a shiver that they were the only two people in the room — perhaps even in the entire building. The fluttering in his heart, however, ceased when his eyes came to rest on the massive, time-worn book lying open across three quarters of the reading room's central table.
"We acquired this yesterday," said Amelia, "fully legally, fully on this side of the Veil." Alexander had already begun to read the sharp-ended, branching script embossed in the millimeter-thick pages to which the book had been flipped. It was a language he had studied and partially understood, but its name remained a mystery to him and every other scholar with which he had discussed it.
"It's got to be an incunabulum, judging by the script alone — 11th earth century or earlier. but its size…"
"Biggest incunabulum we've ever seen. Linda's already taken a sample and sent it out to be dated, and I asked around in the Library for a source for the script — you'll be flattered to know that the vast majority of the people I spoke to cited you as an expert, by the way — but beyond that, I'm entirely stumped. It's nothing the Foundation knows anything about, but I'd like to squeeze as much from it as can possibly be squeezed before they so much as catch a glimpse of a fleck of it."
"Beating them to the punch is a good enough reason to look this thing over on its own," Alexander said half-distracted, already in the midst of a more thorough examination. He had already begun with his pencil and notepad to translate the script. "Who gave it to you?"
"It was a legacy donation. An old millionaire from Jim Thorpe — one Vaughn Barrera — had been sitting on it for decades, and it's a shame it took him dying for it to finally get the treatment it deserves."
"Anything else of note in the collection?"
"Compared to this, all the letters from Jefferson Davis and original manuscripts of 18th-century plays may as well be paperbacks from the '90s. This is, if you'll believe it, the only thing that even barely smacks of the anomalous in the entirety of the donation."
Alexander grasped the back cover of the book with both hands, then let go. He examined the residue left on his fingers and palms: dry, grainy soil that glittered in the light.
"Did you take a sample of this, too?"
"We did. It's also at the lab waiting to be evaluated."
"I might be able to save you some time." He brushed the dust off his hands into a pile on the table (promising internally to vacuum it up afterward) and scraped more from the surface of the book, then turned to Amelia. "I just have to be sure. Do you happen to have a magnet?"
"There's one behind you."
Sure enough: a magnet-studded clip stuck to a file cabinet full of finding aids. Alexander pulled the clip away from the cabinet and held its magnet close to the pile of dust, and a mass of tiny black particles sprung up to meet it.
"This is purely an educated guess based on intuition, but all that metal," he scraped the magnet's furry beard, "is very likely to be meteoric iron. And judging by the historic distribution of this language, it's almost certain that this relic — somehow or another — made its way onto a meteoroid, which subsequently made its way —" he pantomimed a shooting star, its tail his forearm — "down here."
"How can you be so sure of that?"
"I'm… really, now that you mention it, it's really just an underbaked hypothesis — it's likely, to be sure, but it feels like I'm grasping here at what seems the most…" and he again felt the blood rise to his face and the tremors diffusing to his fingers as he stuttered into Amelia's expectant eyes. He had to save face. He raised his notebook with a flourish. "What I am sure of, though, is of this translation!"
He laid the notebook out before Amelia and beside the hulking mass of the book, and she read aloud.
…a religious text. A sermon. I don't know much about the culture it comes from, but the format seems similar to that of our holy books."
"That's made more interesting when you factor in the fact that the culture who used this language, despite being vaguely spiritual, never developed any organized religions."
"How far away did you say they were? In my research someone mentioned that they'd heard someone mention that they were nomads who followed the orbits of asteroids in the Kuiper Belt."
"They were."
"Which means this would've had to come a long way — somehow traveling billions of miles through space and, by complete chance, landing on our late millionaire's property or thereabouts. And then," and with this Amelia looked again into Alexander's eyes, "by some twist of fate, ending up here."
Alexander's breathing once again quickened, and Amelia stopped pretending she didn't notice. She reached out to grasp his forearm.
"Alexander, are you all right?"
"I'm… fine." Alexander managed, with tears in his eyes. Amelia pulled him closer, turning her head to rest it against his chest as she wrapped her arms around him. "Sorry to interrupt the… the research."
"It was bound to happen anyway. The book can wait. I've already started asking Barrera's relatives about how he got his hands on it." She tightened her embrace. "I'm the one who should be sorry. "
"You knew."
"I thought I didn't. That I was imagining things, and then that we — a pair of friends — would be ruined if we took it too far. I'm the one who should be sorry. A week ago I was ready to quit my job here just so I wouldn't have to see you."
Finally, carefully, Alexander reciprocated the hug. They held each other for many minutes in a silence that spoke volumes. It was not nearly long enough, but as they came apart both felt in the other's lingering warmth the promise of more to come.
Alexander smiled his rickety grin — the one which Amelia had over the years strove to inspire with the ambition previously reserved only for her studies — and spoke at last.
"It's getting late." Amelia nodded. "I'll check back in about the book next week. But what a first date that was!"
"What a date, indeed." Amelia was diffident now, trying to tame her wide beam as she gazed absently at the ground and twiddled her fingers. Neither would be fully lucid again until both were finally at rest, lying in their beds simultaneously light-years and millimeters away on the threshold of sleep.