* A story by Beau Cyphre - with an illustration by CORAZON *

My father once told me: "If you want to do things that aren't common, things that seem to be a bit unusual, you own a magic wand to make everything possible: It's called fantasy, and you're born with it; this talent is part of your system. Adult people tend to dismiss it as an illusion, but the believers know that adults always fail."
So come with me now! I want to show you a place in my town, a place you've never seen before. It seems to be behind a curtain, and this curtain is called "time" - time's not real, and the past is breathing through us.
The past I want to tell you about is a place in Canada called Kamloops. It's easy to find, just look at the map and follow my way over Vancouver's Lions Gate Bridge driving north on the Sea to Sky Highway passing Whistler, leaving Squamish behind, touching Pemberton, British Columbia's "little nugget" Lillooet and then further through the wilderness, until there are finally trees like lost children on top of the mountains, no more the many, now only the few, because it's too hot here for the large woods. And there we are, just a seven hours drive away from Vancouver's Downtown, deep within the land of the First Nations.

Did you ever enter a landscape that felt like a painting? A painting that held you, embraced you, hugged you and seemed to never wanna let you go?
Things like that only happen in dreams, but dreams sometimes are so real that they seem to drift into the world we believe to live in. Then we open our eyes, and this changes everything, while a new world is unfolding its wings. This is the feeling you get when you reach Kamloops, the great town nourished by the wild mighty river the old ones still call the snake's song. The language of the First Nations is like a melody, and so is Kamloops.
Let's get lost in this city! Now that we're here it's summer, and summer's burning hot in Downtown.

So let's walk the streets, and I wanna go down to Riverside Park with you, a beautifully romantic place by the water. But to get there it takes some time, and crossing the second street we just stop and stare left, where the sun's almost hidden by one of the houses on the right side of the alley.
We enter the street, and suddenly we seem to be alone. We are alone here, and the sun on our skin and the heat still rising from the asphalt is baking us from both sides; it's so hard to breathe now. Haven't I told you that Kamloops is hot in the summer? But do I remember that it can be so quiet? How did I get here? And where - I turn around, and I can't find you anymore - where, in God's name, where are you now?