By dawn, strange things happened in Burnaby. A man on Edmonds Street suddenly remembered the name of his childhood dog. A woman at Metrotown found a twenty-dollar bill in a coat she’d donated years ago. At City Hall, a long-buried zoning error corrected itself on a clerk’s screen.
He pried it open. Inside wasn’t garbage. It was a dreamscape, compressed. There were silk maps of old New Westminster, a brass diving helmet with a pearl lodged in the faceplate, a working gramophone that played only the sound of a single raven cawing, and at the very bottom, a leather-bound ledger. The ledger wasn’t written in ink, but in tiny, pressed flowers. Each entry was a date, an address in Burnaby, and a single word: Forgotten. repacking burnaby
Deep in the bowels of the Burnaby Recycling and Waste Centre, past the mountains of flattened cardboard and the eerie groaning of the glass crusher, stood a man named Leo. Leo was the night-shift supervisor, a silent, observant fellow who had developed a strange relationship with discarded objects. He believed that everything thrown away had a story, and he was the last one to hear it. By dawn, strange things happened in Burnaby
And now, someone had sent a crate back.