By late October the light had shifted. Mornings came in with a cooler weight, as if the sky had been rinsed in tin and left to dry over the city. The basil in 037 had grown thick enough to press against the paper ribs, tracing green shadows that looked like handwriting from someone I used to know. I thought about cutting it back, but I didn’t. It seemed important to let something keep growing past the point where you’d normally intervene.
We were somewhere around lantern 226 now. I had lost count twice and had to check the ledger, my handwriting narrowing as the numbers rose. The tags had become their own kind of street furniture—aluminum rectangles dangling from hooks, reflecting the slanting autumn sun. I’d walk past a coffee shop and see a stranger tilting one between their fingers, lips moving as they typed the short link into their phone. That private moment between their eyes and the small screen was a kind of prayer I didn’t want to interrupt.
In the evenings I’d loop east toward Rosewood, where the air smelled of mesquite and brake dust. 172 hung in the corner of a bus stop there, its link leading to a story I wrote in one breath about a boy waiting for his father’s car headlights to bend around a familiar corner. The LEDs inside it had dimmed in a way I liked—less a light than a pulse, the kind you might notice in your wrist when you’re trying not to think about time.
At the library, I met a man in a wool cap who asked if I believed the lanterns talked to each other. I told him yes, but not in a language we could hear. More like how two trees know each other’s roots. He said he was a retired sound engineer and wanted to test that theory. I gave him 198, which hung over a bench facing Shoal Creek. Two days later he sent me a recording: a faint oscillation like breath through a paper reed. I’m still deciding whether to believe it.
Some lanterns disappeared. I learned not to call it theft—only migration. 113 vanished from its post outside the cupcake place, but a week later I got an email from someone in San Antonio who said they’d found it strung in a pecan tree outside their cousin’s house. They’d scanned the link and read the story aloud at dinner, passing the phone around like bread. That was worth more than keeping count.
We still said the number—one thousand—like it was a country we’d eventually reach. But lately I’d begun to picture it less as a finish line and more as a kind of weather system, something we’d enter without realizing until we were already inside it. The tags would click together in the wind, the plants would keep leaning toward any scrap of daylight, and the stories would settle into their own rhythms, speaking to whoever bothered to stop.
Last night, at the edge of Zilker under a sodium streetlamp, I watched 226 sway. Its reflection in a puddle made a second lantern, inverted, glowing in the dark water. I thought about the people who would find it later, the way they’d carry its light in their pocket for a while, not even knowing it. And I thought: if the city ever forgets us, these will remember.
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Do you want me to also weave in some subtle signs of your progress toward 1,000 so the pacing of the narrative mirrors your real-world planter count?