One Tuesday night, a municipal truck dumped its load. Among the usual soggy pizza boxes and broken garden gnomes was a single, pristine wooden crate. It was the size of a coffin, bound in tarnished brass, and stenciled with faded letters: PROPERTY OF C.P.R. – TRANS-PACIFIC – 1922.

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.

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.