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.

Choose Your Own Adventure

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.

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.

Clandestine Collective

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.

Crucible Moment

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.

Detective Langley

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.

Floor 1

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.

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.

Historic Homelessness

No one sleeps under the bridges now. The houses float, tethered to footings along the creek, and the city says it is solved. Joe, on a bench, says there is a second kind of homeless, the kind that happens inside a house, and it is a different kind of work.

Ink Breath

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.

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.

Neighbors

The diner counter, the other side of the fence, the stranger who says the curl on your neck looks like it grew there on purpose. Enough of it and the air changes. That is Ringweather.

Also called Community Engagement.

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.

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.

Storytelling

Pin a sentence to the board by the stairs, as a joke, and by the end of the week everyone has a theory. Telling is how the city keeps its records.

Strawbactus

Green as a prickly pear pad and furred like a peach. Inside it is red and wet, and it tastes like a strawberry that spent a summer in the desert and came back changed. Mrs. Delgado eats the first one every year in her driveway and says it is not as good as last year’s.

Walnut Creek

Twenty-three miles, over limestone and then clay, to the Colorado. Ana pulled bacteria out of its mud and grew a film the color of weak tea that makes electricity out of humid air.