A pulse older than electricity. A film of bacteria from Walnut Creek, between two copper plates, rose once for eleven minutes at the exact time the antenna at Central went on the air. Ana wrote under the readings: It is listening for something.

A bottle of Strawbactus wine that will tell you what next year tastes like, if you wait. It does not hurry.

The tap at your ankles when the ripple comes back upstream, like someone knocking from another room. You knock back by standing still.

The week the Strawbactus stops being juice and has not yet become wine. The jar breathes, the room smells like something you used to know, and no one opens it.

Austin, a few decades on: the same creek, the same bridge at dusk, a few more vines than the zoning allows. Everything here happens to people who are trying, and are not always right.

A way of describing the world as shapes you can draw with a compass and a straightedge, and build from what other people throw away. Also a book of the same name by Trash Robot, passed hand to hand in the city until its cover went soft as cloth. Mina found one on the returns cart at Central and read it standing up.

The chill that follows when a hologram’s light goes through fog: cold on the teeth, then a taste like a coin from childhood. It is gone before you can ask what it was.

A banner printed wrong and hung anyway. By Friday somebody has left a candle under it, and the broken instructions are read aloud on the corner like scripture.

A compostable dwelling that creeps block by block like a vine and insists on a porch as proof of humanity. By July it sags, and by August the neighbors are sitting on it.

The breath you can see coming off Lady Bird Lake on a cold morning. It does not ask what you did. It lets some of it go.

Central’s oldest name, and the one people still use. The building at the confluence where the city keeps what it decided it could not do without. A black cat sleeps on the sill above the returns slot.

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 peace made when fear comes apart like blossoms falling into water. Ask her if she remembers the settlement. She remembers the fear, and how it left in one breath.

Leaves in the wind, all agreeing at once. The Treaty Oak is in the middle of it, and a woman keeps glancing up to check whether it was the tree who spoke.

A low hum sensed rather than heard when the Air Canopy synchronizes with nearby living systems. Often mistaken for a heartbeat in the soil.

A garden on the other side of a wall that has always been a wall. At dawn the whole city is one, laid out in petals by people who leave no name.

Dichondra argentea, a silver groundcover that roots wherever it touches the ground. Gardeners plant it at the base of a cutting so that, years later, you can tell where the plant came from.

A mineral sweetness in the air under the Air Canopy after it condenses and releases purified moisture. Many say it tastes of memory. A class under the trees teaches how to read the weather by it.

Green as a prickly pear pad and furred like a peach. Inside it is red and wet, and it tastes like a strawberry that spent a summer in the desert and came back changed. Mrs. Delgado eats the first one every year in her driveway and says it is not as good as last year’s.

The ridges of the Strawbactus beds, warm at dusk because they spent the day collecting the sun. Put your palm on one after dark and it tells you how hot July was.

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.

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.