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.

Rosemary, lavender, then a metallic tang. You can taste the third one before you can name it.

The city’s air system. It filters, and each morning it announces a scent: today, Summer BBQ with a Hint of Jasmine. Nobody asked for the scent. The week it sagged, everyone noticed how much shade they had been living under.

The pull that makes a walker write the street she is walking. A map under a floorboard puts it plainly: Every doorway you open changes the city. Write carefully.

Nothing leaves; it changes hands. In 2045 money has turned into rings, like a tree has, one for each year of rain. You offer a story and a ring goes out. You need a wrench and a ring comes back.

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.

Flood the tray, let it drain, do it again: a planter’s tide. In The Verdant Veil a message is hidden in how the nutrients rise and fall, and Lex reads it off the interface.

The first floor of Central. Two grand doors face you: one carved with rivers and creeks, one with book spines, bookmarks and paper leaves. Past them, the plants. Pick one.

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.

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.

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.

The shift in the air when a block’s giving outweighs its taking. Windows feel easier to open. Strangers talk like neighbors.

I’m a middle school librarian, and I first saw a free little library up in Seattle this summer. I’ve seen them popping up around town and told my husband I would love him to make me one. Never did I imagine he would produce such a fine piece of woodwork and construction, a mini replica of our house. Now I can be a 24-hour librarian.

Sentences written by hyphae in whatever damp you leave them: a corner of a wall, the underside of a library card. No ink. You read it by touch, and it says what the wall remembers.

The current that locks a heartbeat to a foundation. It rises through the crack, alive, and keeps your time. Stand still and your chest agrees.

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 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.

Nothing is sent away. Crushed glass goes to the trellis shop on Aldrich, bike tubes to the woman who makes them into hinges, cardboard to the cube makers. The van goes that way anyway.