A building that outlived its first job and took a second one. The Independent was luxury condos, and then, after the drought years, three floors of mushrooms on the offsets, and by 2034 nobody called it anything but the Stack.

The hawkers’ headquarters, a boathouse on an island in Lady Bird Lake, with wires across the floor and sketches taped to the walls like scattered prayers. Some of the people sleeping there have a roof for the first time. When the water turns blue, they are blamed first.

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

The sound phones make when they find each other again. A green light on a box that used to be a cell repeater and is mostly tape, then a dozen phones on the plaza, then a hundred.

A postcard tucked into a paperback about trains and distance, in a Little Free Library on the way to Clarksville. On the back, in faint writing: The creek remembers.

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.

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.

The vine and the wall take turns. The city keeps asking how much of itself to let the vines eat. One year the answer was the insulation.

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 thought half-heard over a bad feed. They think in gradients, or maybe they sink in gradients. Neither word will settle, and you carry both home.

Tinkerers and water-keepers who live on an island in Lady Bird Lake under roofs made of collected trash. When the water turns blue they are blamed first. They are up to survival.

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.

What grief, love and magnetism have in common: they are invisible until something takes off. Then the whole flock turns at once, and you are the only one in the street who knows what it spelled.

A vine that grows to the rhythm of whoever is sitting beside it. Sit calmly and it climbs. Sit worried and it holds on to the wall.

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.

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.

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.

The first cohort of ReLeaf, scattered now. In the rehearsal years, when the first gardens were being tuned on rooftops and bus stops, they staged concerts with soda tabs for cymbals and mulch for reverb.

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.

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 building is not remembering; the building is memory, pooled and shelved by time. Ask Jean whether you will forget this, and she says you won’t, not entirely.

The city’s grammar. Every alley has its own syntax: bottles grown into trellises, chip bags pressed into shade. Its rhythm is measured in reuse, and it falters when a silver cube turns up with nothing to say.