Chapter 1 · 10 pieces
Light
Wood, char and firelight. Crystal light bases, a little campfire and lanterns, each lit from inside by a flameless light. Rest a stone on top and it glows like it has sat in a hearth all evening.
Lichen
Walk any shore on this coast and the rocks are written on: a black crust where the spray reaches, orange and gold rosettes above it, grey-green maps that grow a fraction of a millimetre a year. Each is two lives in one, a fungus and an alga that agreed to share. Lichen keeps its colony in small cells divided by dark lines. Ours does the same, and shows them only when the light is behind it.
Ammonite
The same shores remember an older sea. The sandstones of Hornby Island and the east coast of Vancouver Island settled on a sea floor seventy million years ago, and they still give up ammonites, the coiled shells of animals that swam here, turned to stone. Our slab holds one the way the rock does: a faint impression by day and, by night, the whole shell, chamber by chamber.
Nodule
Some of those shells were sealed inside nodules, rounded stones that formed around them on the ancient sea floor and kept them whole. Split one on the beach and the ammonite is there, where it has waited all along. Our nodule is that moment, held: a stone like any other until the light inside finds what it carries.
