The archive under the garden. There is a stone with a mark cut into it, a hatch behind the dryer in Unit 14, and a sub-basement door that is supposed to be locked. All three open on the same shelves.

The hour a crowd gathers to be seen rather than to see. A stranger took apart a shopping cart behind the bus station, and they stayed until dark without being able to say what they were waiting for.

The slow beat through a QR lantern when a donation clears and a leaf lights up on the wall. Some people say it changes their breathing. Stand beside one for a donation and notice your own.

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

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 grackles go down to the creek at first light and an hour before dusk, and come back oldest first. Set your day by it. The one with half a tail always takes the top.

A Little Free Library stocked and kept by staff of the Austin American-Statesman and the Texas Book Festival. The shelving needs some repairs, and the stewards say so plainly.

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 footbridge over Lady Bird Lake. At dusk people stop in the middle to watch the staggered balconies glow purple, and the bridge hums back a little, as footbridges do now.

Also spelled Phluger Pedestrian Bridge.

A paper lantern turned into a planter, with an ID tied to a story, a song or a walk. No two are alike. Number 037, the first one, gives a single note, an E, and only when someone sings it.

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 quiet in the kitchen after somebody asks whether love is attention or appetite. Nobody answers, the Oracle hums louder, and the silence rises like bread with seeds in it.

A mild tingling behind the eyes when people witness a verified act of generosity. Neurologists call it a mirror-empathy response; poets call it the return of faith. It makes memory slippery.

The agreement between the self that doubts and the self that dares, struck across the years at dusk. Doubt makes you gentle. Courage makes you wise.

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 group gardeners whisper about, led by Morgan Thorn. They hide messages in the ebb and flow of the nutrients, and leave their mark on the irrigation.

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.