“And where are the windows? Where does the light come in?”
By Hei Lam Ng
Untitled, Hei Lam Ng, 2019
You smell the plants in the breeze, it tastes like misty daybreak. You hear the clattering of the ground as you walk on it. The plants you smell are the fibre that make up the organic carpet underneath your feet. They rustle, but you know that they are not fallen leaves. They brush your ankle gently as you walk, you know that they are a micro-forest of their own. They intertwine to form this soft webbing which you discover rolls out for a distance of a few minutes as you continue to walk.
Your toes hit the end of the carpet; it feels coarse and solid. You sense a difference in temperature at the bottom of the structure, it radiates heat slightly. This ambience of warmth spreads along the edge, to the left and to the right, and to infinity. It resembles a sensational experience you had before. It smells like the dust drifting in the air; it tastes like a chewy bubble; it sounds like a low hertz from a muted television; it feels like being touched gently by something lively.
You recall that it is “light.”
[The break down of a sensory pilgrimage, the genesis of making sense. —DM]
the Gorge
By Dayna Mahannah
Between the main road and the seawall, condos rent for $2700 a month. Between the seawall and the water, tents are hidden in the bushes. There are breweries and a shipyard on the east side of the Gorge Waterway and an urban community garden and a migratory bird sanctuary on the west. The seawall runs along part of the Gorge, where people run and walk their dogs and cycle.
People love being by the water. The ocean connects an entire world. From the right standpoint on a clear day you can see the United States of America! The Olympic Mountains look like a hyper-realistic watercolour.
I don’t usually go to the café on Thursdays, but I am home alone and home is getting crowded. The dogs and I gravitate to the seawall with the rest of the seasiders. I get a big coffee at the café with a name that would be audacious if it wasn’t accurate—Fantastico. Ethiopian beans, roasted on site, Canadian water? Hopefully not straight from the Gorge.
A bald man sits at the opposite end of the table and asks what I am reading. It’s a book about writing; he is also a writer. An hour long conversation with this stranger is easy. He eats a brownie and tosses the walnuts into the brush behind him—he hasn’t the teeth for them.
He is writing a series of children’s stories about a girl who goes on adventures with her dog and her red wagon. Intuitive, he says, when I ask if there is magic involved. It seems like the obvious question. The characters are magic but they aren’t aware of it. The stories are fictional but he talks about his daughter and she shares the same name as the protagonist.
Another walnut flies over his head. My dogs watch it with vigilant eyes. Always watchful. Dogs are good, he observes. Help get you outta your head. I ask if he has a dog. He doesn’t. How does he get out of his own head? Write four sentences a day, he says. And one of them should scare the shit out of you.
The dogs and I say goodbye to the man and the pile of walnuts. I think about the biological economics of swallowing a scary sentence; it must erode the oesophagus—fine—but the externalities will fill up the empty side of the bed.
That night, one dog sleeps on the couch, the other on the floor. I talk on the phone ‘til three in the morning, discussing the disparities of the synonyms “freedom” and “self-destruction.” I’m in a condo by the sea.
[Maybe the walnuts are magic too; only the dogs would know. —HN]
Originally from Hong Kong, Hei Lam Ng is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Vancouver, BC. Her work spans photography, printmaking, text art, and book objects. An anterior background in Chinese creative writing often adds a subtle poetic touch to her work.
Dayna Mahannah is a writer and editor residing at varying degrees of latitude on the west coast of Canada. She is the co-founder of SPiEL, a reading event for emerging storytellers. A graduate of SFU's The Writer's Studio, Dayna has also worked for Adbusters and with BeatRoute Media, and written for various publications.