Giant ragweed. By late summer it is taller than you, and the whole city sneezes in its direction. The Botanical Gardens keep a patch by the gate, with a label.

The instant when the story, the structure and the self all give way at once and you have to pick one to carry out. Nobody picks well. People pick fast.

Rings of contribution where the price tags used to hang. The library is the main street now, and the depot, and the garden, and the mycelium carries the news.

The hum of the swarms over the lake, like a restless congregation. By day it carries rumor. At 3 a.m. the freight drones reroute around the tents so no one wakes.

A rebranded laundromat pretending to be a bar: kombucha on tap, pipes painted black, light too cold for comfort. Mid-cycle in Unit 14 the spin thins to a hum, a seam opens, and there is a hatch.

The refrigerator hums in the key of whatever you were arguing about. Jules and Alex were asking whether love is attention or appetite, and it got louder.

A network of small water-cleaning modules chained across the lake, pulsing with currents you cannot see. In Shifting Channels they work in silence while the city decides whom to blame.

How a garden gets a drink when no one is home: a wick, a drip line, a tray that floods and drains. Two how-tos here show how to build one out of what you have.

A crack poured into the foundation on purpose, to open when history needs it to. In Underneath the Neon the asphalt splits into a spiderweb of light.

A copy that comes out different is not a mistake. It is the next generation, each mutation another leaf on the same branch. Teo knows his own cubes by how he folds the corners, and there are cubes at the top of the wall that nobody he knows folded.

The diner counter, the other side of the fence, the stranger who says the curl on your neck looks like it grew there on purpose. Enough of it and the air changes. That is Ringweather.

Also called Community Engagement.

A cooperative of women, queer people and people who have done their time. They won the Circular Austin Showcase with gardens that clean the air and soften the street noise. Then the money came.

A court paper folded once and carried in a back pocket until it stops being a verdict and becomes something else. You can press it between pages. Nothing in it changes. You do.

The unmapped city under the mapped one: tunnels past the loading dock, rooms that are not in the plans, a council that meets beneath the Library and is on no blueprint. It grows next to everything that was approved.

Making a thing better than it was by making it into something else. In the city it stopped being a word anyone said aloud; it became the ordinary way of doing things. A sparkling-water can now holds creek gravel, a succulent, and some fossils that did not comment.

The quiet reclamation of concrete by leaf and root. They pull up the parking lots one by one, and the bridges start to breathe.

A garden that grows up instead of out: cans, wicks, a strip of cloth for water. It is the plain thing ReLeaf does, and the thing most of the stories hang on. Mrs. Delgado’s is the one the neighbors ask about.

A bookstore and wine bar near Rosewood and 11th, built in 1886, that remembers everything that has gone through it. A writing group meets on its balcony on Tuesday nights. Jean pours something amber and does not ask your name.