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.

A book you read with one finger saving the last choice, so that if a page ends badly you can go back. It always ends badly once.

Whoever planted the wall at dawn. They work in the hours nobody is watching and sign nothing, and a garden shows up on a Tuesday and everyone says it was always there.

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 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.

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.

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.

A stall under I-35 has a sign: WE ARE NOT SELLING FISH, WE ARE MEASURING TRUTH. It holds up jars of creek water and says what each one smells of: battery runoff, coolant, fertilizer wash. The thing that smelled fishy was never the creek.

Also called Digital Deception.

The clean snap of scent released by the mint between the pavers along the creek. It signals steady footing and readiness to help. Press it with your heel and the air goes clean.

Plants that eat attention and breathe out ornament. They glow green at boasting and amber at humility, and the block learns how little humility it had stored. Nobody chose them. We posted about 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.

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

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.

The inhale that holds time open long enough for you to meet yourself. On the boardwalk at dawn it lasts through three visits, and it is let go when the oldest one says to tell the child you were that you did well.

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.