Lover's Fireworks

Half a kilometre of black water, and the fireworks going off on the far side of it.

Beautiful things hold their value at a distance. Whatever crosses that much open sea arrives changed — thinned by wind, worn down by the time it takes to get there. Bitterness first, then something sweet waiting on the other side of it, the way medicine gives way to sugar.

Two people watch the same sky and never turn to look at each other, as though it had been agreed in advance. A little longer, both of them think. Just a little longer. Then the sound catches up with the light, and it is over.

Damfool writes before he blends. Each release starts as a person — a place, an era, a life with something unresolved in it — and the formula follows the character rather than the other way round. Lord of Tree is drawn from an Ah Cheng novel. Most of the rest are his own.

Nothing in the line shares a signature, and none of them is the lead. The recurring figures are altar keepers, aunties, and people coming home after too long away, closer to the characters met at the edge of a world than to anyone at its centre. The seasons make it literal: Cantonese memory in the first, Fujian in the second, a Macau port town in the third, three generations of one timber family in the fourth.

Behind all of it is one Macanese perfumer at one bench in Chengdu. He builds his own components and tinctures instead of buying them ready-made, and works with materials that are hard to get or specific to one place — aged nutmeg paste from a Penang spice factory running for over a century, Tibetan yak extract that took a year to render.