There was a jackhammer in my chest this morning, or maybe just across the creek, but the distinction didn’t matter. Its rhythm became my pulse, an arrhythmic metronome that synced with something lodged behind my sternum. At first, I mistook it for anxiety—the kind I used to chew like old gum when she and I still shared a kitchen, splitting eggshells into the compost like nothing was rotting between us.
The hummingbird was watching from the bookshelf, just above the divorce paperwork. Carved from pale wood, beak sharp and wing-frozen in a posture of endless offering. My grandmother gave it to my grandfather the year they stumbled across Fun Valley, a Christian-themed RV park she swore God had led them to. On the base, in her jagged hand, she’d written: “56 years” in red ink, almost bleeding into the grain. I always thought the bird looked more like a woodpecker.
This morning I flung it—no ceremony, just a quick wrist flick, almost casual—into the paved channel they still had the audacity to call Shoal Creek. The water barely made a noise. I waited for something symbolic to happen: a sign, a splash, a sudden bloom of wildflowers. Instead, the jackhammer groaned through its next breath, indifferent.
At the Central Library, I tried to focus. I stood in the atrium for a while just watching the escalators hum, people riding their arcs of motion like they were conveyor-belt deities. Above the reading porch, the Floravores had begun to bloom again. No one knew who’d seeded them—some claimed it was a guerrilla horticulturist with a grudge against AI-generated real estate, others swore it was a secret city pilot program—but the result was the same: devouring vines with variegated leaves and psychedelic blossoms that smelled like lemon zest and static. They fed on the calcium-rich walls of the annex, digesting the biomaterial of the city’s cheap post-boom prefab shells, metabolizing ambition into pollen.
I stepped outside for a call from the lawyer. The Petition was moving forward. Theresa's lawyer had brought up the mushroom thing again, her voice nasal and pinched in the voicemail: “We believe Mr. Reyes—has been operating a fungal-based side business without formal disclosure…” A taboo we’d buried beneath years of compost and microdoses. The irony stung; she’d once helped label jars.
I found the old Live Oak and stood beneath its vast canopy. The same one near Seaholm where I practiced Qigong, planting invisible roots down into the limestone, pulling imaginary silk threads skyward through my palms. As I pressed one foot into the soil, the vibrations of the jackhammer melted into a kind of sonic moss—vivid green, rough against the nerves. My breath tasted like powdered sugar and copper.
The lawyer spoke in measured tones, crisp as dry crackers. I nodded in all the right places, though I wasn’t listening. I was watching a hummingbird—real, not carved—hovering just above a cluster of blue mistflower. Its wings shimmered violet. It made a sound I could feel behind my eyes. A high whine like the glint off polished aluminum.
“Fun Valley,” I whispered to no one.
The bird didn’t answer, but for a second, I thought I saw it wink.
Beneath me, the roots shifted.
🚮 W.A.S.T.E.: Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Bandwidth Bloom | The night every light in the city blinked: not out, not off, aligned. It starts as a hum against the jawbone, and the fireflies might be tuning forks. |
| Biomimicry | Asking the termite mound how to cool a building, and the leaf how to hold water, and writing down the answers. Credit goes to the termites. |
| Boggy Creek | The quiet creek in East Austin, the one the other creeks get mentioned instead of. Eli lives near it, with a lighthouse lens in his front room, eight feet of brass and prism catching the morning. |
| Cane of Blossoms | The elder’s staff, carved with flowers as if the wood had grown them. When it strikes the boardwalk twice, the next thing she says is for the child you were. |
| Circular Economy | 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. |
| Ebb and Flow | 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. |
| Ego Eclipse | The half second when shame or awe wipes the room out of your head. The mouth keeps opening and closing. For a moment there is no one left to be embarrassed. |
| Future Austin | 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. |
| Grackleclock | 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. |
| Lady Bird Lake | The wide place in the river, where the festivals and the protests and the blooms of algae all stand and look at their reflections. An island in it has a boathouse, and people live there. |
| Lake Exhale | The breath you can see coming off Lady Bird Lake on a cold morning. It does not ask what you did. It lets some of it go. |
| LifeThread | The strand sewn into every object, linking where it came from, who used it, and what they said about it. The silver cube arrived without one, and a whole plaza tried to give it a lineage. |
| Organic Media and Fiction | 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. |
| ReLeaf | 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. |
| Rootpulse | A faint vibration sensed through soil or concrete when bio-infrastructure awakens. |
| Seaholm | The old power plant on the lake. It has not made electricity in decades and runs anyway: the instruments say it is off the grid, and the phones in the turbine hall charge faster. By 2035 it is a fermentation school, and the concrete smells like toast. |
| Secret Garden | A garden on the other side of a wall that has always been a wall. At dawn the whole city is one, laid out in petals by people who leave no name. |
| Shoal Creek | At 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. |
| Tradescantia pallida | Purple heart. Leaves the color of a bruise that is healing, small pink flowers, and roots wherever a stem touches. Frost takes it to the ground and it comes back from the root. Edward Palmer collected the first one near Ciudad Victoria in 1907. |
| Waller Creek | Named for Edwin Waller, the city’s first mayor. It runs south from the north end of town, past the university and the east edge of downtown, and ends in Lady Bird Lake. A song on this site sets it beside the Red River district and the live music. |