A writer at Vintage. She touched a railing without noticing, and the iron warmed. She tends to hear the question under a story before the story is finished.

The root under the roots, where the fungus and the pipes agree. If you hear it humming, don’t answer. Unless it’s Thursday.

The boardwalk at first light. A woman has already ridden the lake once, and three older versions of her are waiting there to tell her she did well.

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.

A mark that grows in soil or on a screen and comes up as a decision. The hummingbird that came out of the creek wore one on its back, shaped like a love letter on fire.

Algae 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.

The 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.

A crack poured into the foundation on purpose, to open when history needs it to. In Underneath the Neon the asphalt splits into a spiderweb of light.

The low rumble of the MoPac, a railroad before it was a road, heard as a chant by anyone who stands still at the edge of the Intake. It threads time through the body and asks for nothing.

Fungi hired to do what nobody else would: eat the cleaning fluid, drink the runoff, mend the creek bank from underneath. In the Stack the mycelium also remembers. A memory of heat prepared it for more heat.

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 weather on the nights the paper lanterns go up: light hanging in fragile things, swaying between celebration and remembrance. A woman under the Congress Bridge carries one made of grocery paper and inked wishes, and waits for a footpath that only opens when enough people need it.

The peace made when fear comes apart like blossoms falling into water. Ask her if she remembers the settlement. She remembers the fear, and how it left in one breath.

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 faint vibration sensed through soil or concrete when bio-infrastructure awakens.

A corridor that opens when a story leans on a wall. The rooms off it are lined with words nobody has written yet.

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.

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.

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 glow that stays after you have touched the nothing, and cannot be summoned by effort. Meditation does not bring it back, nor qigong, nor heated yoga. It does not come when called.

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.

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.