The Lexicon Orchard

By late summer the buildings along Congress had gone dark under figs and muscadines. The glass still caught the sunset, but only in the seams between leaves. Kids tugged fruit from the vines and tossed them to each other in soft arcs over the bike lanes. No one worried about dinner anymore. Hunger had become the kind of story grandparents told to scare children into finishing their bread.

On the balcony of the book and wine shop on 11th, we ran the story club. The balcony looked west toward a hill of roofs and treetops that swayed like a slow parade. I laid my laptop on the table and opened the Lexicon. The screen bloomed with a grid of little green tiles, each one a term we were growing this month.

“Show me again,” Iris said. She was new, hair tied up in a ribbon cut from an old shirt. She had a habit of tracing the rim of her glass with one finger, as if the city might hum if she hit the right note.

“It starts with a suggestion,” I said. “Anyone can coin a term. Think of it as a seed. You give it a name, you write a one line gloss, and it drops into Germination.”

I clicked a tile labeled Cicada Mercy. The panel opened.

Coiner: R. Khan
Balance: 126.40
Definition: The soft pause we give for the loudness of others.
Usage tags: pending
Backers: 38

“When people donate,” I said, “they do not tip me. They add to the term’s balance. The balance is a promise. If the term is used and tagged in a story, the promise starts to pay out.”

“Pay how?” Iris asked.

“Three streams,” I said, counting with a sticky finger. “Membership revenue from readers, digital sales of the monthly anthology, and the city’s Arts Dividend that shows up every quarter because stories keep people gentle. We split each stream by tags. A writer earns the base share for finishing a story. Then every tagged term in that story gets a piece. That piece flows to the term’s ledger. The coiner gets credit, backers receive micro royalties by share, and anyone can reinvest what they earn into new terms.”

Iris looked over the railing. Below us, students carried boxes of pears toward a free table by the crosswalk. A boy reached for one and missed. His friend caught it behind his back, grinning.

“So if I coin a term,” she said, “and it gets used, I could make a little money.”

“Yes,” I said. “Or you could leave it in the system and grow the garden.”

She leaned over the table. “What are the big ones this month?”

I scrolled. Tiles shimmered.

Windfall Bridges
Balance: 402.00
Definition: Overpasses draped with vines and footpaths that only appear during harvest.

Bruised Sunlight
Balance: 311.75
Definition: The color in the air after a storm when the city smells like figs.

Library of Breath
Balance: 257.10
Definition: A quiet place under the bats where stories are checked out to the wind.

“These will probably make the cut,” I said. “Writers look at balances the way cooks look at a crate of peaches.”

She laughed. “So the money changes the taste.”

“It changes the attention,” I said. “But attention is a spice. You still have to cook.”

People trickled in from the stairwell. Mendy dropped a tin of loquats on the table. Sterling set down a notebook with a dozen crimson tabs bristling from the side. We passed fruit and prompts and talked about the theme. It was the Month of Bridges. Our stories would travel by foot. We had until the full moon to finish.

Iris kept her eyes on the screen. “If I back a term,” she said, “do I have to write?”

“No,” I said. “But you can. The other piece is craft. Anyone can submit a draft that tries to work a term to life. The editors curate. If your draft makes it in and the term is tagged, you share the base with the rest of the issue’s writers. The term itself earns separately.”

“So writers can also invest in terms,” she said.

“Exactly. Most of us do. It is a way to vote with both heart and wallet. And because balances are public, the process stays honest.”

She nodded. “And the credits?”

“For each term,” I said, “the coiner stays visible forever. The ledger shows every hand that watered it. When we publish, the byline lists the tagged terms, and each one links to the ledger. People can see how a word found its way into the world.”

Mendy tapped her glass with a spoon. “Writing time. Twenty minutes. The prompt is one term from Germination and one from the Orchard. Go.”

I picked Windfall Bridges because the balance was serious and because I had biked across a footbridge only yesterday that had sprouted grape leaves so thick I thought I had rolled into a painting. For my second, I picked a shy tile that had almost no money at all.

Paper Lantern Weather
Balance: 6.12
Definition: The light you carry when forecasts disagree.

The story wanted to rhyme those two. Bridges and lanterns. Money and attention. I wrote a scene about a woman who waited under the Congress Avenue Bridge after the bats cleared the air. She carried a paper lantern she had made from a grocery list and a water can. She had written wishes along the ribs with a felt pen. The glow spilled down her forearms. She was on her way to meet a friend on a footpath that did not exist except in harvest, a windfall bridge that opened only when enough people needed it.

In the story, the woman argued with a man about what counted as real. He said the bridge was a superstition. She said the city only stabilized when enough stories held it in place. He asked who paid for that. She tapped her lantern.

“Everyone with a little light,” she said.

When time was up, we read out loud. Sterling’s piece used Bruised Sunlight to talk about old loyalties. Mendy wrote a letter to a child who would never learn what it meant to stand in a long line for bread. Iris did not read. She watched our faces with a look that stayed.

On my way home along Shoal Creek, the city kept purring. Figs tapped at windows. By the time I reached my block, my pockets were sticky with seeds. I climbed the stairs and uploaded my draft, checked the boxes for the terms. The Lexicon confirmed the tag and noted the balances with a slender chime.

Two nights later, the selections went live. Twelve stories under a common cover. Each one carried a little arbor of tagged terms that linked back to their ledgers. People read them on the train to work in the vertical orchards. They read them on lunch breaks with grape skins under their nails. The metrics began to drip like a steady rain. The Orchard filled.

Iris showed up on chat the next morning.

“I coined a term,” she wrote.

I clicked.

Tendril Arithmetic
Balance: 0.00
Definition: How vines measure the distance between strangers.

The phrase tugged at me. It was patient but curious, coiled and ready. I sent it five dollars from my dividends and watched the tile take its first breath of color. Others must have felt the same. By noon the balance lilted past ninety. Someone left a note in the ledger that read, simply, Thank you for this.

The next week, Iris submitted a first draft. She set it in a school that ran the length of a skywalk between two towers. The students learned counting from the way a grapevine looped and clasped its way along the railing. They were told to take their measurements from the living world. When they reached the chapter on subtraction, their teacher led them into a stairwell thick with mint and said, “Listen for what is gone.” It was a small, luminous piece. It made us quiet. I tagged Tendril Arithmetic and we accepted it on the spot.

Dividend Day arrived with a market under the overpass. The vines had thrown a sudden sweetness into the air, pears and rain and hot stone. A band played in the shade. We set up a projection that showed the Orchard growing term by term as the quarter closed. Tiny numbers rolled like beads. When the clock ticked to zero, the system distributed the split. Writers got their base. Terms got their shares. The coiner of Windfall Bridges earned enough to fix a broken bike. The backers of Paper Lantern Weather received a handful of dollars and, more importantly, a surge of attention. People poured their earnings back into the young ones. You could watch generosity ripple across the tiles.

I found Iris near a crate of loquats, watching her phone with a soft, startled smile.

“You did it,” I said.

She shrugged, then laughed. “It made more than I expected.”

“You can withdraw,” I said. “Or reinvest. Or both.”

“I want to split it,” she said. “Half back into Tendril Arithmetic. Half into someone else’s term, something almost empty.”

We scrolled the Orchard until we found a tile pale as new leaves.

Doorstep Pollen
Balance: 1.83
Definition: The trace of the places that want you.

“It is lovely,” Iris said, and sent the money with a tap.

After the distributions, we held a little ceremony. We read names from the ledger. We thanked the coiners. We thanked the readers. We thanked the city itself, which had accepted our odd bargain. The Arts office had put out a statement last year that said the stories were good for public health. People slept better on nights they read them. They fought less often in the comment sections. They carried less fear in their shoulders. So the city sent us a quarterly seed fund, which we split with the Orchard like any other revenue stream. The vines did their part without asking for anything at all.

As twilight leaned into the underpass, I opened the anthology on my phone and read Iris’s paragraph again. The students were counting the loop of a tendril to learn a new kind of distance, the kind that holds rather than pushes away. The teacher asked them to write what they felt when the vine found them and did not let go.

The page flickered as notifications bloomed. A backer had added five dollars to Doorstep Pollen. Another had coined a term called Bat Weather, the hush before the dark starts to move. Someone in North Austin who had never been to the balcony wrote a note under Paper Lantern Weather that said, I carry one every night now when I check on my grandmother.

Later, as we stacked crates and swept up pear skins, Iris looked across at the vines and spoke in a low voice that felt like part of the dark.

“I did not expect it to feel like this,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like investing in my neighbors.”

I thought of the grid of tiles, the balances rising and falling, the way attention trickled into the shy corners when people chose to give rather than take. I thought of a bridge that only appears when you need it, and the light you carry when forecasts disagree.

“That was the plan,” I said.

She slipped a loquat into her pocket. “What do we do next month?”

“We open Germination,” I said. “We invite suggestions. We let the Orchard vote with pockets and hearts. Then we write.”

She nodded. “I have a title for the theme.”

“Tell me.”

She looked up at the underbelly of the bridge, where bats would soon begin to spill like a living curtain.

“Common Wealth,” she said.

I typed it into the Lexicon. The tile appeared, blank and bright, waiting for a first small gift. The city answered with a warm breeze that tasted like figs. The grid blinked once, as if agreeing. Then somewhere a kid shouted, and a pear arced up and over the bike lane, and a hand reached out and caught it before it touched the ground.