By the first week of November the air smelled faintly of cold iron, as if the wind had been turning over stones upstream. Lantern 241 had taken on the pale hue of oversteeped tea; the basil inside was collapsing in slow motion, stems gone translucent. I didn’t replace it. Instead I tied the module’s paper ribs tighter, a kind of shoring-up, as if I could hold the season in place.
A woman stopped me outside the corner store on Comal, her thumb resting on the black square printed along the lantern’s seam. “It’s a doorway,” she said, almost to herself. I asked where it led. She shrugged. “Not here.”
Later that day I scanned it myself, though I already knew the story it carried—this story, in fact, unspooling in real time, my own words opening like a trapdoor beneath me. A map appeared, not of Austin, but of a street I’d walked in childhood, except halfway down there was a building that had never been there before. Between two brick facades I knew by heart, a narrow white structure leaned forward into the shade, with a single window in place of a door. Behind the glass: my grandfather’s old pocketknife, the one I’d lost the summer he died.
I didn’t go inside. Not yet.
The modules had begun to act like seeds scattered by a wind we couldn’t chart. 172 was no longer in the bus stop—someone told me it was hanging in a co-op kitchen near Hyde Park, draped with rosemary now, the LEDs flickering in the same slow heartbeat. At night, their codes pulled in strangers from parallel corners of the city, each one stepping through to a story as specific as a fingerprint.
One evening on Cesar Chavez, I saw three lanterns strung together over a closed taquería, swaying like a constellation. A man in a wool cap—the same one from the library, I think—stood beneath them with a small recorder, capturing the overlapping rustle of paper, breath, and traffic. When I asked what he heard, he smiled. “They’re not just talking,” he said. “They’re singing to each other.”
I’m not sure if I believe him. But I do believe that each QR code is a hinge between here and elsewhere, and that whoever passes through leaves something of themselves behind.
The ledger says we’re at 247 now. Still far from a thousand, but lately I’ve stopped counting forward. The number feels less like a goal and more like a tide. One day we’ll look up and find ourselves surrounded—not by one thousand lanterns, but by the weather they’ve made, a canopy of light and leaf and language swaying above us, portals humming in the wind.
Last night I dreamed I stood before that strange white building, its window glowing like the paper skin of a lantern. The pocketknife inside was open, blade catching the same sodium light I’d seen in Zilker. When I woke, my hand was curled as if holding it. I still don’t know if I’ll go back.
⸻
If you want, I can also thread in more concrete markers of “migration”—how each lantern’s movement subtly rearranges the map of the city—so that the network begins to feel alive in both space and memory. That could make the next chapter even more immersive.