You keep eleven gardens and none of them are yours. They belong to the people whose walls they grow on, and you split what they make. ReLeaf pays a little for the carrying.

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 warmth coming off anything that is thinking: a server rack, a phone on a charger, a laptop on the bus seat after someone has gone. Your palm takes it for a pulse. It is not a pulse, and you check anyway.

A detective who once belonged to the city’s official order and now works under the Air Canopy, distrusting clean answers. Twenty-one hours without sleep, he still takes the tram. When it gets bad he pictures a jazz bar on a quiet Tuesday, a cat asleep in his lap, and then he runs.

No one sleeps under the bridges now. The houses float, tethered to footings along the creek, and the city says it is solved. Joe, on a bench, says there is a second kind of homeless, the kind that happens inside a house, and it is a different kind of work.

Diego came to Austin with one bag and three languages and picked up two more in the line for water. In the Camp the children chalk a hopscotch grid where the trucks used to idle.

The wide place in the river, where the festivals and the protests and the blooms of algae all stand and look at their reflections. An island in it has a boathouse, and people live there.

A record that follows the thing: who made it, from what, what they were thinking. Everything in the city has one. Hold your phone over the silver cube in the ferns and the screen says only No record.

Where the books get answered. Pynchon, Atwood, Vinge, Hofstadter, Eliot, and a hundred pages of what a garden would say back.

A story you can stand inside. The Jejune Institute did it on the streets of San Francisco for three years; here it is done with a planter that has a number. The costume is optional.

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.

Rain, neon, a collar turned up. The city is a witness who will not testify. Mira says it was never about the money.

Stories and songs made to be copied by hand, repaired, and let go. Each one is tied to a planter, a wall or a bench somewhere in the city.

The cooperative that keeps the gardens, the stories and the van. Nora Sanchez started it, and whoever tends it owns a share. The name is a leaf turned over.

At the Seaholm Intake the creek runs both ways for a breath, a light on the rail comes on when the current flips, and people leave rested and clear, as if a long afternoon had just ended. Come without hurry. A tin plaque on a boulder downstream says LISTEN HERE, and the metal under it is polished by hands.

Pin a sentence to the board by the stairs, as a joke, and by the end of the week everyone has a theory. Telling is how the city keeps its records.

A city that grows the way a forest does: from the bottom, in layers, with the old growth holding up the new. Walk far enough and you stop being able to say where the buildings end.

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.

Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology. Also the underground post in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, with its muted horn on the box and its letters that travel outside the official mail. Put a word in. It will get where it is going.

Named for Edwin Waller, the city’s first mayor. It runs south from the north end of town, past the university and the east edge of downtown, and ends in Lady Bird Lake. A song on this site sets it beside the Red River district and the live music.