Key 19,
The Collective The boy and the girl were both obsessive collectors.
As twins,
They thought and acted alike.
She liked collecting and pressing wild flowers from the woods at the back of their garden.
While she loved the variety,
What fascinated her the most was the similarities between them.
The boy,
Like most boys,
Liked cars and football.
He was equally proud of his collections of modern cars and his football cards.
Like his sister,
He had developed a meta-fascination with his collections.
He was obsessed with numbers and order.
His cars were arranged neatly on shelves in rows of seven.
He was unhappy having anything less than seven cars in a row,
So would save up his pocket money to buy seven at a time.
When collecting football cards,
He would also focus on how many were missing from a team,
As opposed to how many he had.
He spent most of his days indoors looking down and in at the detail.
He had no idea at this time that this obsession would lead him to being an accountant.
The girl would spend all day outside,
Mostly looking up.
Her mother was forever calling her in for supper when it was getting dark.
The girl didn't know she was to become an astronomer.
The seed of this calling came when she was eleven,
From an idea that arrived one autumn when the flowers started to get thin on the ground.
She wondered what else she could collect in the winter months.
She looked up and saw some birds migrating beneath the clouds.
She wondered who had put that collection together in perfect formation,
And who was collecting flocks of birds and the swathes of clouds.
After supper that very evening,
She went outside to take the garbage out.
She looked up at the stars and wondered who put that lot together.
