THE HOUSEPLANT MISTOOK ME FOR GOD
Shoal Creek was coughing again. Probably the mold. Or maybe it was the drones trying to reseed the banks with biodegradable moss spores—they’d been dropping “ReLeaf Pods” all week, little gelatinous green grenades that exploded into aesthetic redemption: wild indigo, milkweed, guilt. Everything looked better. That was the problem.
Bryce walked with a paper bag full of spent tea leaves and anxiety. He had recently declared himself a musician—not to the world, just to the mirror—and the mirror had laughed politely and asked if he had anything new to play.
“I play the silence,” he told it, and the mirror clapped.
At the edge of the trail where the trail forgot it was a trail and became more of a suggestion, there was a converted drainage tunnel now referred to by the city as an Organic Media Sanctuary. Kids tagged it with holograms and QR-code prayers. Someone had painted a mural of a cassette tape crying into a pool of compost. It was beautiful in that overdone way that made you feel like crying, but only because you hadn’t eaten enough that day.
It had rained overnight. His shoes were wet. His thoughts had mildew.
⸻
Bryce remembered waking up at 4:13 a.m., shifting from the bed to the couch, again. That ghost move. Not dramatic. More like ritual. No blame. Just movement. [REDACTED] had been curled like a nautilus, self-contained, dreaming probably of scales and modal improvisation. Meanwhile, he’d dreamed of undercooked metaphors.
He used to think this migration to the couch was a small gesture of love, like a breath you hold so someone else can sleep easier. But lately it felt like a reenactment. Something he’d seen in childhood: his father asleep on a couch, a canvas left mid-stroke on the easel, stepmother talking too loud in the kitchen about tomatoes and silence.
The couch meant: I don’t want to fight anymore.
⸻
He reached the Seaholm oak—broad-limbed, riddled with moss and the ghosts of architectural intentions. They were still converting the intake into a gallery. There were whispers it might instead become a meditation chamber, or a data farm for mindful algorithms. Either way, a public good.
He sat under the oak and performed a kind of half-assed Qigong. His hands moved like forgotten kites. The tree didn’t judge.
“People think I’m someone I’m not,” he said aloud.
A squirrel darted past, clearly unimpressed.
⸻
Lately, strangers mistook him for a famous musician. Once it had been Julian Casablancas. Another time, the son of Mick Jagger. He had neither the swagger nor the lineage, but he played along.
“I’m more of a lowercase artist,” he once told a barista who complimented his jacket. “Like, I make things, but only when the world’s not watching.”
The barista had nodded like that meant something.
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W.A.S.T.E. had a new campaign up now—Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology. They were trying to reverse the damage of the Symbiopod homes, which had promised cheap eco-living but had begun digesting themselves like anxious starfish. The city’s newest initiative: let nature take over more, not less. Invasive beauty as redemption. Let the vines eat the walls. Let mushrooms replace insulation.
People were calling it Structural Biodegradation with a straight face.
His old apartment had already been converted into a “biophilic habitat” for pollinators and sentient mycelium. “It’s an adaptive reuse success story!” the landlord had texted. Bryce now lived in a floating cargo pod near I-35, decorated with thrifted keyboards and unresolved feelings.
⸻
He closed his eyes.
For a second, he thought he heard applause. Then realized it was wind in the tree above. Or perhaps the applause of the soil beneath, slow clapping his return to earth.
“I’m not trying to be my father,” he whispered.
“Good,” said a crow, “he already happened.”
⸻
And that was the thing: maybe humility wasn’t about bowing so low your face hit the floor. Maybe it was just standing, finally, in your own goddamn shoes—even if they were soaked through and smelled faintly of cedar mulch and disappointment.
Maybe groundedness was a kind of strange art form. An imperfect song. A lowercase becoming.
And maybe, just maybe, the mushrooms under the oak were already composing his next track.
🚮 W.A.S.T.E.: Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Bryce | BryceHe is in most of these, and not always the same one. At Lady Bird Lake he holds a folded paper like a hymn book. By the creek he carries a paper bag of spent tea leaves, and calls himself a lowercase artist. |
| Central | CentralIt sits where Shoal Creek meets Lady Bird Lake, and the long glass prow catches the light off both at once. On the roof there is an antenna the grackles have claimed. Most people still call it the library. |
| Circular Economy | Circular EconomyNothing 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. |
| Cultural Shift | Cultural ShiftRings of contribution where the price tags used to hang. The library is the main street now, and the depot, and the garden, and the mycelium carries the news. |
| Ecological Balance | Ecological BalanceThe 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. |
| Geometron | GeometronA 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. |
| Glassrain | GlassrainThe 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. |
| Guano Bridge Books | Guano Bridge BooksA 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. |
| Hyper-algae | Hyper-algaeAlgae built to clean the air at speed. Eva says it could fix everything or break it worse, and the Gardener’s vat of it, fed by the tainted Canopy, is the root of his control. |
| Immigration | ImmigrationDiego came to Austin with one bag and three languages and picked up two more in the line for water. In the Camp the children chalk a hopscotch grid where the trucks used to idle. |
| Ink Breath | Ink BreathThe faint pulse of letters forming themselves. Under Congress Bridge it comes with a thread of jasmine and the musk of bats, and the sentence arrives before you finish the thought. |
| Library | LibraryCentral’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. |
| Literary Criticism | Literary CriticismWhere the books get answered. Pynchon, Atwood, Vinge, Hofstadter, Eliot, and a hundred pages of what a garden would say back. |
| Music | MusicThe songs are filed here, with the people who sang them. Dottie has played the honky-tonks since the eighties. Bryce, asked by a mirror whether he has anything new, says he plays the silence, and the mirror claps. |
| Organic Media and Fiction | Organic Media and FictionStories 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. |
| ReLeaf | ReLeafThe 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. |
| Shoal Creek | Shoal CreekAt the Seaholm Intake the creek runs both ways for a breath, a light on the rail comes on when the current flips, and people leave rested and clear, as if a long afternoon had just ended. Come without hurry. A tin plaque on a boulder downstream says LISTEN HERE, and the metal under it is polished by hands. |
| Silver ponysfoot | Silver ponysfootDichondra 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. |
| Threadglow | ThreadglowA low vibration underfoot when the mycelium network recognizes you, and a faint light on the footbridge that follows your step. It is not an alert. It says: here you are. |
| Upcycling | UpcyclingMaking 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. |
| Urban Greening | Urban GreeningThe quiet reclamation of concrete by leaf and root. They pull up the parking lots one by one, and the bridges start to breathe. |
| W.A.S.T.E. | W.A.S.T.E.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. |
| WasteSpeech | WasteSpeechThe 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. |